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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/25371256">Suspicion</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/daphnaea/pseuds/daphnaea'>daphnaea</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>The Mentalist</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst with a Happy Ending, F/M, Romance, Trust Issues</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-07-19</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-07-26</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-05 09:54:42</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Teen And Up Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>12</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>48,650</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/25371256</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/daphnaea/pseuds/daphnaea</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>"Lisbon," he said, "I wouldn't do that to you. I'm your partner." She laughed out loud. "Right. My 'partner' who ditches me for six months for an undercover op he can't be bothered to tell me about. My 'partner' who hangs me out to dry in an interview with our lead suspect. I'm a stepping stone to Red John. Just like Lorelei. Except you've had to stand on me for a lot longer."</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Patrick Jane/Teresa Lisbon</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>46</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>117</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>1. Chapter 1</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>Goes AU during S5E1 - The Red Bead/The Crimson Ticket. I know this territory has been covered by many excellent writers before, but it's such an interesting inflection point - Jane's operating at peak bull-headed jackass here, yet in the very next episode (Devil's Cherry), his subconscious is using hallucinations to tell him he has real doubts about his revenge quest. I wanted to dive down the rabbit hole of what might happen if Lisbon took a stand against him, and see where they might end up on the other side.</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  <strong>Day 1:</strong>
</p>
<p>As Agent Lisbon listened to Jane's first solo interrogation of Lorelei, the sick feeling in her stomach congealed into an ugly mass of outraged revulsion.</p>
<p>No, she decided. It wasn't an interrogation, not even by Jane's unconventional standards. It was, it occurred to her, a warped kind of seduction. On both sides. "<em>I can make you a better offer,"</em> he promised. "<em>Kiss me,"</em> she said.</p>
<p>Lisbon couldn't deny it any longer: there was something wrong with Jane. She'd tried to tell herself she just wasn't used to him anymore, that over the time they'd been apart she'd softened her recollections of him and now was tripped up by things she would have taken in stride six months ago. She'd tried to tell herself it was because this was a Red John case and those always brought out his crazy side. But she was a good enough investigator to trust her gut, and her gut was telling her that the man who'd come back from Vegas was not her Jane. Was not someone she even knew.</p>
<p>But she'd seen him before, she realized. In video clips. This Jane was the closest she'd ever been in real life to the TV psychic with his hard, cold eyes and his shiny suits. It stood to reason, she supposed. He'd gone back to his old cons in Vegas. And a man was, as they said, what he ate. Jane had spent half a year eating lies and hating himself and everyone around him, and if he thought he could just stroll back into the CBI and shake all that off like rain from an umbrella, the only person he was fooling was himself.</p>
<p>By the time he and Lorelei had set their next appointment, <em>"We'll talk again this evening," </em>Lisbon had had enough.</p>
<p>She confronted him in the hallway by the elevator. "What are you? Huh? Crazy?" Dressing him down came naturally. She could tell she wasn't even close to getting through to him, but it was a pattern so deeply ingrained that she didn't know how to break past it to something that would make him stop and take a real look at what was going on. She rolled over his attempted interruption. "I told you to be careful," she continued, "I told you not to go over the edge."</p>
<p>"And I told you not to listen," he retorted.</p>
<p>Her jaw almost dropped, and she understood that his earlier request - <em>"I need to be able to tell her truthfully that we are alone" - </em>had been about her all along, and not the least bit about him or Lorelei. As if he, the king of liars, needed to believe something was true to persuade someone else of it. He just didn't want her interfering in his little plans, as usual. She couldn't believe she'd actually missed him while he was gone.</p>
<p>"Don't be childish! I am not your girlfriend! I am an officer of the law. How could I not listen?" She'd thought he understood that. That she was just giving him the same plausible deniability he always claimed he was giving her. She'd thought that was understood. How could he have imagined she'd actually not listen? "You kissed her," she reminded him, trying to return to the point. "You offered to help her escape."</p>
<p>"And I would ask her to marry me if I thought she'd buy it."</p>
<p>This time, Lisbon's mouth did fall open as the penny finally dropped. So that was why he'd thought she'd be a good little girl and give him his privacy with his psychotic mistress. He thought he'd done that good a job of wrapping her around his finger. Incandescent fury blazed through her, and she welcomed it.</p>
<p>"Oh sure, I know how that one goes," she told him, voice dripping with venom. "Then tomorrow when she asks you to bring in the justice of the peace, you just act confused and say you were too hyped up to remember what you said, right?"</p>
<p>"What?" Jane put on a very convincing facade of shock and dismay. Or perhaps he actually couldn't believe she'd put the pieces together, even when he laid them out for her so very, very neatly. "You don't think -"</p>
<p>He reached a hand out toward her shoulder and she recoiled instinctively.</p>
<p>"No," he said, voice calm and careful and afraid, "you're wrong. That's not -"</p>
<p>She walked away before he could finish whatever he was trying to say. It was just going to be more lies anyway, and she had better things to do with her time than shovel his sheep dip.</p>
<p>She held herself together long enough to get an update on their actual case from Van Pelt, guiltily pleased there was nothing she needed to do until Rigsby and Cho got back from their interview in Bakersfield.</p>
<p>But her relief at escaping to the refuge of her office evaporated as soon as she got there, and the memory waiting for her hit her in the face: <em>"Good luck, Teresa. Love you."</em></p>
<p>Bang bang.</p>
<p>She couldn't believe she'd spent so many hours obsessing over what had turned out to be just another lie. She'd stewed over it for the whole drive to Vegas, wondering if he'd meant it, and if so what he'd meant by it, and what she'd <em>wanted</em> him to mean by it, and by the time they'd gotten to that warehouse she'd had no answers at all. So she'd asked him.</p>
<p>She cringed now, looking back at it, at how nervous she'd been, how the words had tumbled out of her because she just couldn't keep them in even though she knew it wasn't the right time for a personal conversation. His brush-off had filled her with a slurry of relief and resentment: that nothing had to change after all, that he was so unaffected by something that transparently tied her in knots, that he'd said it at all if he wasn't going to stand by it.</p>
<p>That was the part she'd had the hardest time understanding: why say it to begin with? And yet, somehow, despite how long she'd known him, how closely she'd watched him operate, it had never occurred to her that it was just a lie, a con, a trick like any number of others he'd played on her and everyone else since they day they met.</p>
<p>She thought back to his reappearance at her church. It should have been obvious just from that, how lightly he took her and her feelings. He'd treated it all like a big joke, from his impersonation of God to his disappearance in the midst of her well-deserved tirade. Six months of nothing, when he knew full well how worried she was, how desperate she was to reach him, and he couldn't even bother to hear her out. He'd stayed just long enough to secure her assistance, and once he'd gotten what he wanted, he was done with her.</p>
<p>She couldn't believe what a naive fool she'd been. Well, it had taken her an embarrassingly long time, but she finally understood his game, and she was done playing it. It would be a blessed relief, she told herself as tears burned her eyes, to wash her hands of Patrick Jane.</p>
<p>Sure, they still needed each other to catch Red John. She wasn't going to let her wounded feelings impact her ability to do her job. But beyond that they were done.</p>
<p>Of course, because his sense of timing was never less than impeccable, that was when Jane barged into her office, a ball of indignant energy.</p>
<p>Lisbon schooled her face into cold neutrality. If he thought he was going to get her back on his hook with a little overwrought acting, he was sorely mistaken.</p>
<p>"How could you say that?" he demanded, pacing around the office. "How could you even think it?"</p>
<p>She leaned back in her chair. "Oh gosh, how <em>could</em> I think you'd ever lie to me or manipulate me to get what you want? It's not like you've ever done <em>that</em> before."</p>
<p>"Fine, sure, I've lied, but not about something like <em>that</em>!"</p>
<p>"Like what?"</p>
<p>"Like what I said last time we were in this office," he hissed at her.</p>
<p>"What <em>did</em> you say?" she asked, deadpan. "I thought it was all just a blur to you."</p>
<p>"Don't play games with me," he snarled.</p>
<p>"I'm not the one playing games," she retorted, "but fine, sure, let's just lay it all on the table. You lied about loving me, pretended not to remember doing so, and now you're pissed off that I caught on and called you out."</p>
<p>"Why would I have lied about that?" he asked, dropping into the chair in front of her desk. "What did I have to gain from it? You were already going along with my plan."</p>
<p>"Maybe you just wanted me too distracted to have second thoughts when I figured out someone was calling my brothers to inform them of my untimely death," she mused, "but probably that was just a side benefit. My guess is that it was all about Red John, like it always is with you. You wanted me to give you a shot at killing him yourself, and maybe you were hoping I'd let you get away with it if you did. You had to figure a jury wasn't too likely to give you two passes for murdering a single serial killer. But with a convincing enough police report backing up your self-defense story, the DA wouldn't even press charges."</p>
<p>Jane stared at her for a moment, no doubt trying and failing to find the flaw in her logic. Then he seemed to deflate. "Lisbon," he said, "you know me. I wouldn't do that to you. I'm your partner."</p>
<p>She couldn't stop herself from laughing out loud at that. "Right. My 'partner' who ditches me for six months for an undercover op he can't be bothered to tell me about. My 'partner' who hangs me out to dry in an interview with our lead suspect. My 'partner' who constantly tries to keep me in the dark. I'm not your partner. I'm a stepping stone to Red John. Just like Lorelei. Except you've had to stand on me for a lot longer."</p>
<p>"That's you how you see it?" He looked genuinely stricken. She had to give him points for that. But then if there was one thing you could rely on Patrick Jane for, it was not knowing when to quit.</p>
<p>"That's how it is," she said. "But there's no need to get dramatic about it. This doesn't really change anything."</p>
<p>"You think you not trusting me, you thinking I'm using you, doesn't change anything?"</p>
<p>She shrugged. "Not anything that matters to you. You don't need my trust or my friendship to catch Red John. You just need to stay on my team and have my cooperation. And that part hasn't changed. We can just stop dressing it up as more than it is. It'll save both of us some time and energy. You can stop pretending to give a damn about any of us, and I can stop pretending I can save your soul."</p>
<p>He stuck his chin out. "You think you've solved some great mystery here, huh? Well, you've got everything mixed up and backwards - as usual - and once the dust clears you'll regret jumping to these ridiculous conclusions."</p>
<p>She rolled her eyes. What had she really expected, that he would just roll over and admit he'd been found out? Not him. He never could back down. "Fine," she said. "Whatever. But for now, I have an actual case to solve, and shouldn't you be planning your next date with Lorelei? Maybe bake a lock pick into a cake or something? Personally I think she's a girl who'd prefer a shiv, but then you're the one who knows her best."</p>
<p>"This is not over," he told her, and stalked out of her office.</p>
<p>She let out a long breath and sagged down in her chair. Telling him off had felt good while it lasted, but now that he was gone again, her fury ebbed away, leaving a bleak sort of desolation in its place.</p>
<p>She closed her eyes and looked within herself. She gathered together every tender feeling and secret yearning she'd ever harbored for him and rolled them up into a ball. Then she lit a match in her heart and set them on fire.</p>
<p>Then she felt nothing at all.</p>
<p>It wouldn't last, she knew. But for the time being, she could look her team in the eye and do her job, and she'd take that over the alternative.</p>
<hr/>
<p>It was past four in the morning when the banging on her apartment door started. Lisbon should have been asleep, but predictably she was lying awake in bed cataloging every remotely personal interaction she'd ever had with Jane and trying to puzzle out if he'd ever cared about her at all, if any of those moments of connection had been even slightly genuine, or if it had been a nonstop con from the beginning.</p>
<p>She conceded to herself that she hadn't needed much from him, over the years, to keep her hooked. She'd been an easy mark, and he'd had her measured from the start: a care-taker with an instinctive need to fix broken men and difficulty getting close to anyone. It must have been like Christmas for him, the day they met. As if she'd been tailor made to smooth his way into law enforcement. All he had to do was throw her the odd soulful look or sweet gesture and she came through for him every time, no matter how much damage he did to her or her career in between.</p>
<p>It was, of course, the secret to every great con: get the sucker so turned around she'll beg you to take her for everything she has. Make her think it's all her idea to hand you her life on a silver platter, and she'll wave you off with a smile as you leave her with nothing.</p>
<p>Lisbon had to face the truth: he'd seen right through her, and he'd used what he'd seen, and she had no one to blame but herself for how happily she'd lapped it all up, time after time.</p>
<p>It hurt, of course, but she'd found that the truth usually did.</p>
<p>The banging got louder, and she realized she'd have to get up and deal with it if she didn't want the neighbors involved.</p>
<p>She hauled herself out of bed, shrugged on a robe, and stumbled to the door in the dark. "Go away," she said.</p>
<p>"Let me in," he replied. "You know I can just pick the lock."</p>
<p>She gritted her teeth. "If you set one foot inside this apartment I'm arresting you for trespassing and you'll be spending the rest of the night in jail," she promised.</p>
<p>"Please?" he tried. "We need to talk."</p>
<p>There was no way she was letting him through that door. She was tired and frayed thin, and whatever he was trying to convince her of, she'd rather eat dirt than give him the advantage of being able to watch her face while he did it.</p>
<p>"You can talk from out there," she said.</p>
<p>"Fine," he said, and there was a faint sound of cloth sliding against door, but no further communication.</p>
<p>She put a hand to her forehead. "If you don't have anything to say, I'm going back to bed."</p>
<p>"I want to tell you that I'm sorry." This time his voice came from lower down, as if he was sitting on the ground, and as it hit her that he was actually owning up to what he'd done to her, a wave of weariness passed over her and she found herself mirroring him, sliding down to the floor and leaning back against the door.</p>
<p>Then she remembered that he was Jane and nothing he said was ever straightforward. "What are you sorry for?" she asked.</p>
<p>"For - for treating you so badly for so long that it became easier for you to believe that I'm such a cold bastard that I'd toy with your heart for my personal gain than that I love you but I'm too conflicted and cowardly to admit it when I'm not in fear for your life."</p>
<p>She closed her eyes. She wished he wasn't such a good actor. "Why are you here, Jane? Why are you at my apartment in the middle of the night trying to mess with my head? Why is it so important to you that I believe this particular pack of lies? Shouldn't you be busy plotting how to crack Lorelei once we get her back from the Feds?"</p>
<p>She heard him laugh. "I should be, shouldn't I?" he said. "I tried to. But I couldn't. I couldn't think about anything but you. And that made me so angry. That you should be distracting me when I was closer than ever to catching him. And then I realized that I wasn't really angry with you at all. I was angry with myself. When I left six months ago, I thought the damage I was doing to you and to our - our relationship would be fixable. Or even if it wasn't, that it would be worth it if I got him without anyone else having to die. But it turns out I was wrong. About all of it. And I don't know what to do anymore. So I came here. Because you're where I go when I'm lost."</p>
<p>Lisbon didn't think she would have bought that even before he'd burned the remnants of her faith in him to the ground. But she knew by now that coming at him head-on was almost always a mistake. And the retort that sprang to her lips - that she'd thought all the direction he needed was painted in blood on his bedroom wall in Malibu - seemed too cruel for that hour of the night. So she just said, "What do you want from me, Jane?"</p>
<p>"Tell me how I can earn back your trust. Just - tell me what to do."</p>
<p>She laughed. He had some nerve. "It doesn't work that way."</p>
<p>"I want to prove to you that I'm not just using you. What if - what if you take me off the Red John case? You deal with Lorelei, you deal with everything, you don't have to even tell me what you find out."</p>
<p>"Oh come on. You'd just break into my office every night and read the files for yourself."</p>
<p>"Kick me off the whole team, then. Kick me out of the CBI."</p>
<p>She wondered for half a second if he was actually serious before she remembered what world they were living in. "Nice try," she said. "You know full well I can never call that bluff if I don't want to end up like Bosco. We all know how Red John reacts when you're taken off his case."</p>
<p>"Let the FBI take the case," he suggested. "It won't be your fault, then."</p>
<p>"Yeah, that creepy video we got starring Agent Darcy proves just how well he'd respond to that. No thanks, I don't want any dead Feds on my conscience."</p>
<p>A pause. "I don't know what to do, then. I don't know how to untangle you and me and him enough to show you what I really care about. What can I do?"</p>
<p>A coldness settled over her. She might be a mark to him, but she wasn't going to be such a pathetically easy one that she gave him step by step instructions on how to hoodwink her. "You don't do anything, Jane. I'm perfectly clear on what matters to you already. I'm done here, I'm going back to bed."</p>
<p>She stood up, then paused for a moment to see if he was going to start shouting or pick her locks, but there was no sound at all from the other side of the door. She shook her head and made her way back to her cold bed.</p>
<p>Sleep didn't come any easier than it had earlier, though. She found herself thinking about what she'd effectively confessed to both Jane and herself that day. What had he said about conning Red John? <em>I'm giving him his heart's desire. He will see what he wants to see.</em></p>
<p>And what had Jane given her as rope to hang herself with? <em>Good luck, Teresa. Love you. </em>Her heart's desire. Goddamn it.</p>
<p>But she wasn't going to fall for it. Because there was, she reminded herself, one thing she wanted more than him, more than anything else. The truth. Without the truth, you were nowhere. You had nothing to hold onto. Her childhood had taught her that lesson better than any other, and she wasn't going to forget it for anyone. Not even him.</p>
<p>Because when she looked back at their time together, not at what he'd said but what he'd done, she knew the truth. Patrick Jane didn't love her at all.</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0002"><h2>2. Chapter 2</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  <strong>Day 2:</strong>
</p>
<p>When Lisbon opened her front door the next morning, in a lousy mood no amount of coffee was going to overcome, Jane fell backward into her entryway and blinked up at her from the floor.</p>
<p>She felt a piercing pain behind her eyebrows. "You spent the night outside my door?"</p>
<p>He pushed himself up off the ground and shrugged, looking even groggier than she felt.</p>
<p>Her mouth turned down. He was, she reminded herself, always willing to make himself as pitiful as possible to win sympathy. It may have worked on her before, but it wasn't going to this time. "Get out of here and clean yourself up. We have the hearing over Lorelei in an hour."</p>
<p>He grabbed the cuff of her pants. "We can let the Feds keep her if you want that."</p>
<p>She raised the fingers of the hand not holding her travel mug to her temple and massaged gently. "I thought you were convinced she'd escape or be killed if they have her."</p>
<p>"I think if one of those things hasn't happened already it's because Red John's people are just waiting until there's less attention on her," he said.</p>
<p>She did not have enough energy for Jane's games and reverse psychology that morning. And though she desperately wanted to believe in the FBI's integrity, she had no proof Jane was wrong. An FBI mole would neatly explain why it was Wainwright dead in that limo in Nevada and not Red John.</p>
<p>She shook her doubts away. Jane was just trying to manipulate her into thinking she had some kind of power over him while at the same time manipulating her into letting him have his own way, but with her blessing. What she said to him didn't matter, and she was sick of arguing about it. The only way out was to disengage entirely.</p>
<p>"Do whatever you want, Jane. You always do anyway. Just please go away. I can't lock my door with you sitting there."</p>
<p>He picked himself up, apparently lost in thought, and departed without further comment, which she decided to take as a small victory.</p>
<hr/>
<p>What Jane wanted turned out to be framing Agent Mancini as a Red John accomplice, and then being chased through the State House, ultimately taking refuge in a women's restroom.</p>
<p>The irate agent had been all set to charge in after him when Lisbon grabbed him by the arm and snapped, "Mancini! Get a hold of yourself! Have a little dignity."</p>
<p>Mancini, red with rage, had stiffly pulled himself from her grasp and stomped away.</p>
<p>Jane, who was not even vaguely acquainted with dignity, had stuck to her like a limpet until they were safely out of the building.</p>
<p>On the plus side, he had gone on to solve their outstanding murder case with no more furor than some light public humiliation at a lottery prize presentation, which for Jane was positively restrained.</p>
<p>Unfortunately, the lack of complaint paperwork to fill out left her with no excuse to stay late at the office, so she found herself back home at an entirely reasonable hour, with nothing to do but ponder Jane, and Lorelei, and the fact that circumstances left her with no way to distance herself from the slow-motion train wreck the two of them were engaged in.</p>
<p>She very much wanted to pour herself a drink or six, but given the likelihood of Jane pestering her in the middle of the night, she knew she needed to keep her wits about her. So she just sat on her couch and channel-surfed and tried to convince herself she wasn't waiting for a knock on her door.</p>
<p>Because that would be pathetic. She wanted him to leave her alone. She wanted nothing further to do with him that didn't involve catching murderers. Beyond his professional skills, the only things he had to offer her were lies and heartache, and if she would still rather take those than have him display no interest in her at all, then that would mean she had no self-respect left whatsoever.</p>
<p>So it couldn't be that. She was just used to him, that was all. Dealing with his sheep dip had gotten to be so habitual that she didn't know what to do with herself without it, even after he'd been gone all those months. But that was a problem with a solution. She'd just fill up her off hours with other things. She'd see her friends. She'd take a class. She'd hit the gun range. She'd let Van Pelt drag her along to yoga.</p>
<p>Lisbon had fired up her laptop and was looking at her local community center's offerings (would she enjoy learning to crochet, or to make cheese at home? Probably not, she had to admit) when the knock came.</p>
<p>"Who is it?" she asked the closed door.</p>
<p>"Me," Jane said. "Can I come in?"</p>
<p>"No."</p>
<p>"Can I talk to you?"</p>
<p>"Do I have a choice?" she asked.</p>
<p>"About having the conversation, no. About the timing, yes. I can come back tomorrow instead if you prefer."</p>
<p>It was another one of those choices he specialized in, the ones that weren't really choices at all. And he knew full well that she wasn't one to postpone the inevitable.</p>
<p>"Let's just get this over with."</p>
<p>"I love you," he said. "I realized I never said it in so many words last night, and I don't want there to be any confusion. I love you."</p>
<p>"No you don't."</p>
<p>"I love you and I'm in love with you. I have been for a long time."</p>
<p>She squeezed her eyes shut. She'd imagined how those words would sound coming from his lips. She'd imagined how she would respond. She had not imagined this.</p>
<p>"Jane, I don't believe you. I'm not going to believe you, and the more you try to make me, the less I can stand to be around you at all."</p>
<p>She heard his huff of frustration through the door. "So what do you believe?" he asked. "Do you really think that every moment we've ever shared together was a lie? That I've just been conning you since the day we met and none of it ever meant a thing to me?"</p>
<p>"I know you've been using me since the day we met, and I frankly can't believe you'd dispute that. You came to the CBI for a purpose and stayed for a purpose, and that purpose had nothing to do with me or any desire to assist the law enforcement community of California. You push me, you manipulate me, you sabotage my career, and then you pull out some bit of charm or vulnerability when you can see I'm fed up with you and you want to get back on my good side. But no, I don't think that's all it's been. You don't just use me and the team to hunt Red John, you use us to flatter your vanity and to meet your basic human need for companionship. But none of that means you care about us, or are willing to offer us much of anything in return. It just means we're convenient, undemanding sops for your ego and a readily available audience for your tricks."</p>
<p>A soft thud, then, and when he replied it was from much closer to the ground. "I suppose most of that is true as far as it goes," he admitted, "but it isn't the whole story. I do take from you much more than I give. But I want to do better. Because I do love you. Very much."</p>
<p>Lisbon sighed and once again found herself following his lead as she sat down and leaned back against the door. "Repeating that isn't going to make me believe it," she told him. "Why can't you let this go? Why can't you just move on to your next scheme and leave this alone?"</p>
<p>"Because you love me too," he answered.</p>
<p>She drew in a sharp breath and opened her mouth, but he kept talking before she could get any words out.</p>
<p>"Don't bother trying to lie about it," he said. "We both know you would never have latched onto this alleged con of mine if me saying I loved you wasn't important to you. You would have forgotten it or laughed it off as just one more of my bits of nonsense. But instead, it shattered your trust and our friendship. And come on, all those calls while I was in Vegas? You wouldn't have done all that if I wasn't in your heart. That's why this is hurting you so much now, and why I can't just let it be."</p>
<p>Her throat was tight and achy, but she forced her words out anyway. "That doesn't make any sense. If you claim you care about me and you know you're hurting me then you should stop, shouldn't you?"</p>
<p>"No, because while in the short term you'd be relieved to have some space from me to lick your wounds in peace, in the long run you'd be much more hurt by me letting you believe I don't care than by me forcing you to work through this until you see that I truly love you back." A pause. "Besides which, I'm a selfish bastard and I just can't stand to lose you."</p>
<p>"You mean, you just can't stand to lose," she retorted.</p>
<p>"You really think I'd put you through all this just to score some points?" he asked. "Just to prove I can get the better of you? You think I'm that much of a monster?"</p>
<p>"How am I supposed to know why you do anything?" She wiped at her eyes.</p>
<p>"No, no, we're on to something here," he insisted. "Let's think this through. If I'm telling the truth, if I do love you, then it's obvious why I'm here, right?"</p>
<p>She shrugged.</p>
<p>"Okay," he said as if he'd seen her, "so what's my motivation if I'm lying? According to you, my initial purpose in this con was to get you blindly on my side before the showdown with Red John so I could more easily take my revenge and get away with it. But there is no longer any imminent confrontation, and all I'm doing at the moment is making you more and more upset with me. So how does that advance my goals?"</p>
<p>"I thought you were sure you'd crack Lorelei and have Red John in no time," she pointed out. "So you're just planning ahead."</p>
<p>"But conditions have changed in the interim," he replied. "You now have a massive grudge against me and are wary of anything I try to get you to do. So I'd be much better served by finding another co-conspirator on the team instead. Cho, for example, understands taking the law into your own hands when the personal stakes are high enough. He'd probably bend the rules for me as long as no one but Red John got hurt. And Van Pelt has her own personal ax to grind. If I told her she could get her revenge for what O'Laughlin put her through, worked that angle, I'm sure I could get her on my side. Maybe channel information to me before it got to you, maybe clean up some evidence that didn't match the official story once it was over. Doing either or both of those would be much more straightforward than trying to regain your trust at this point."</p>
<p>She had to admit that made sense. The rest of the team was still pissed at him for disappearing on them for half a year, but she had no doubt he could win them back over if he really tried. She wondered if she ought to warn them against him before he got around to it.</p>
<p>"But I'm not at either of their homes," he continued. "I'm here. Trying to convince you that I love you. So how does that play out? If I succeed, if I persuade you of my sincerity in order to use you once again, I build up your feelings for me, maybe even avail myself of the warmth of your bed, and then what? I somehow manage to get my revenge, then abandon you once I don't need you anymore, breaking your heart a second time? That's pretty low, even for me, isn't it? When there are, as we've established, cruelty-free alternatives available to me."</p>
<p>Lisbon digested this. "So you're saying, it isn't just about Red John anymore. The point has to be to hurt me as well. But why? What have I done to you? Why would you hate me that much?"</p>
<p>"I don't hate you even a little bit," he said patiently. "But now that we've worked all that out, you have to ask yourself what's more plausible - that I love you, or that I bear you so much malice I'm trying to hurt you as much as I possibly can just for the sake of it?"</p>
<p>She had no answer to that, which was depressing. On the face of it, she had a hard time attributing that much viciousness to Jane. But he certainly could hold a grudge, and execute elaborate plans of revenge, and it did seem within the bounds of his creativity to explain his scheme to his victim step by step as a way of dispelling suspicion. She remembered what he'd said about Red John: <em>He thinks I'm the fish and he's the fisherman.</em> Well, she was done fishing for him.</p>
<p>"I don't think it even matters anymore," she said, too emotionally exhausted to follow him down anymore rabbit holes. "What matters is that no matter your intentions, I don't trust you. And even if you did have some feelings for me, why is it suddenly so urgent? There have been plenty of times over the course of our history when I haven't liked or trusted you much more than I do right now, and it certainly never struck you as a crisis before. You never showed up on my doorstep night after night. Yet now, when we're getting Lorelei back tomorrow, when you think everything's coming to a head, suddenly here you are. I don't buy it."</p>
<p>"Let me tell you -" he began.</p>
<p>"No," she said. "I don't want to hear it. If you need to get something else off your chest, go bother someone else, or write it in your journal. I'm done."</p>
<p>She stood up and walked away from the door, trusting him to hear from her voice that if he decided to break into her apartment to continue the conversation, he would not like the outcome.</p>
<p>She went to the kitchen and poured herself one shot of whiskey, then another. She didn't want to think about Patrick Jane anymore. She didn't want to think at all.</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0003"><h2>3. Chapter 3</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  <strong>Day 3:</strong>
</p><p>In the morning, Lisbon discovered an envelope that had been pushed underneath her door while she slept. She thought about throwing it straight into the trash. She thought about lighting it on fire. But instead she left it where it was while she brewed her coffee, and while she took her shower, and while she did her makeup.</p><p>She considered just ignoring it until the evening, which seemed to now be the official time of dealing with Jane's mind games, but the thought of him watching her all day, trying to gauge her reaction to some unknown bombshell, was unpalatable. Especially since they were due to pick up Lorelei in a couple of hours. She doubted anything he'd written was going to make climbing back into that snake pit any more pleasant, but she supposed she'd take any clues he was offering.</p><p>She poured herself another cup of coffee and opened the letter.</p><p>
  <em>Dear Teresa,</em>
</p><p>
  <em>Thank you for reading this instead of crumpling it up and throwing it away unopened as I know you were tempted to. </em>
</p><p>
  <em>You asked about the timing of my apparent change of heart. I understand, from your point of view, why it might seem suspicious. But what happened is this. When you concluded that I was trying to con you by pretending to have feelings I didn't, I got very angry. It seemed ridiculous, after everything we've been through together, after everything you've forgiven me for, that you would break all ties over something I hadn't even done. It seemed unfair of you to judge my conduct with you by how I treat an accomplice of the man who slaughtered my family. And - worst of all - it was a distraction when I could least afford one, when at all costs I had to remain focused on my singular goal. </em>
</p><p>
  <em>Yet I remained distracted. And as my initial outrage wore off, I began to see why you might interpret my actions as you had. It's not that I don't know I've taken advantage of you over the years, or that I didn't think you, in the abstract, deserved better. But I told myself that you were a competent adult who could make her own decisions, and if you were willing to put up with me, why shouldn't I continue on as I was? You knew my plans and intentions, you knew how I operated, and if you kept me on, you were clearly signing yourself up for more of the same. </em>
</p><p>
  <em>That's how I was raised, you understand - to take as much as I could from everyone around me and, if they complained about it, blame them for having let me do it in the first place. I'm not saying that as an excuse - I'm a grown man responsible for myself and my actions - but I never have been good at learning from my mistakes. So I carried on as if it was everyone else's job to constantly protect themselves from the worst I was capable of, and laying the guilt for my misdeeds at their own feet when they didn't. </em>
</p><p>
  <em>I wish I could claim I was better with the ones I loved - that for them at least I could offer more than the least I could get away with - but it wouldn't be true. I can be generous when it costs me nothing, but as soon as something I really want is at stake, all bets are off, no matter who I have to hurt to get it. </em>
</p><p>
  <em>Angela threatened to leave me once. It was while she was pregnant. She told me that she'd grown up surrounded by liars and frauds, and she wanted something better for her daughter. She didn't want her child living with a professional cheat. So she told me that I had to quit my cons or she'd file for divorce. I could see in her eyes that she meant it. This was when I was just starting to hit my stride in the fake psychic trade, making real money for the first time in my life. I wasn't about to give it up, but I couldn't lose Angela, either. So I told her, "I agree with you, but don't you want our daughter to grow up in a beautiful home? Don't you want to be able to send her to any college she gets into? Or would you rather we have to teach her what to say when debt collectors come knocking at the door?" I promised I'd give up my work, but not yet, not until we had enough to take care of the baby properly. I went down on my knees and begged her to let me give her and our child the life they deserved. Angela fell for it. She stayed.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>But nothing was never enough for me. Not when I bought the luxury cars, not when I bought the mansion by the sea. Time went on and my promises changed. "I'll give it up before Charlotte's old enough to understand what I do," I'd say. Angela didn't believe it anymore. Once in a while I could see her thinking about leaving me, but she never said it out loud again. By then I knew she couldn't bear to take Charlotte away from me, or me away from Charlotte. I had won.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>After they were killed, when I was in the mental hospital, I used to imagine that she'd gone through with it. I couldn't conjure up the fantasy that I'd changed, that I'd been the husband and father they deserved and had therefore gotten to keep them, but I could imagine that Angela had come to her senses and left me, and saved herself and our baby. I imagined her living with some decent, honest man - a school teacher, usually - in a normal house, in a normal neighborhood. I imagined her taking Charlotte shopping for new clothes at Sears or Penney's instead of the boutiques in Brentwood we used to frequent. </em>
</p><p>
  <em>And I told myself that I had learned my lesson, that I finally understood what mattered and what didn't. Fame and fortune no longer tempted me, so I thought I had put my greed and blind arrogance behind me. I dedicated myself to vengeance, never resting until I had done all I could to right the wrongs I had brought down upon my family, allowing nothing to stand in my way.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>I never questioned my path. Until this week. Until you forced me to face the consequences of my actions, and to recognize that in truth I hadn't changed at all. I was still selfishly pursuing an empty goal at the cost of everything good in my life. I was still more committed to gratifying my lowest desires than to taking even a modicum of care with the people I loved. I believed that my heart's desire was to kill a man in cold blood, and that I had nothing left to lose, nothing I wouldn't give up to accomplish that.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>But then, with a throwaway line in the CBI hallway, I lost you. And suddenly nothing else mattered anymore - not Lorelei, not Red John, not my own guilt and shame. Finally I understood the simplest thing in the world: Angela and Charlotte are dead. Nothing I can do anymore matters to them. I can't bring them back, I can't help them find peace, I can't make amends to them, I can't even hurt them. But you and I are alive. The things I do to you matter. I can and have hurt you, and perhaps, if you allow it, I can make amends to you. </em>
</p><p>
  <em>Because you are my heart's desire. And I will do anything and everything I can to prove that to you. I won't ask for your trust or your forgiveness yet. I wasn't lying or trying to use you when I said that I love you, but I have lied to you and I have used your feelings to manipulate you often enough to thoroughly deserve your ire and mistrust, no matter their proximate cause. </em>
</p><p>
  <em>But I hope you will consider the possibility that I am telling you the truth. </em>
</p><p>
  <em>Yours,</em>
</p><p>
  <em>Patrick Jane</em>
</p><p>Lisbon read the letter twice as her coffee grew cold. Then she realized she was running late and jumped up to collect her things and put on her boots, dropping the pages onto her coffee table.</p><p>She was about to step through her door when her eyes caught on them, and she gathered them up again, stuffed them back in their envelope, and stuck it behind the volumes on her bookcase, as if hiding the evidence of a crime.</p><hr/><p>The drive to the federal penitentiary where the FBI had stashed Lorelei was tense, but Lisbon turned on the radio as soon as the engine was running, and turned up the volume when Jane opened his mouth to say something to her. He took the hint and spent the rest of the trip looking out the window.</p><p>But there was no empty noise to hide behind in the prison as they waited for Lorelei to be delivered to them.</p><p>"You read my letter," he observed neutrally.</p><p>She shrugged. There was no point in denying it, she knew he could see it on her.</p><p>"What did you think?"</p><p>She shook her head, a bitter smile twisting her mouth. "It was perfect, Jane. But that's How To Spot A Con 101, right? If something seems too good to be true, don't trust it. I've seen you pluck a stranger's dreams right out of the air and offer them up like magic. I'd expect nothing less than that kind of a masterpiece if you were doing the same to me."</p><p>Like every other move in this strange new game they were playing, it was both an accusation and a confession. It seemed so long ago, the days when she'd thought she could hide what she felt for him, or at least that he'd let her go on pretending she could forever. She'd thought that admitting the truth, even in a backhanded way, would feel like an overwhelming disaster. But now, knowing that he saw through her and most likely always had was trivial compared to everything else she felt.</p><p>"You really think I'd use my family's memory to lie to you?" he asked softly.</p><p>She shrugged, glanced at the door through which Lorelei would shortly appear and then at him before looking away. "It turns out you'd do a lot of things I wouldn't have guessed," she told him. "I don't know what you're capable of."</p><p>He looked so hurt and lost that she felt obliged to offer him something despite her better judgment. "Look, I don't believe you've been honest but I'm not <em>entirely certain</em> you're lying to me, either. All you asked was that I'd consider that you might be telling the truth. Fine, I can do that."</p><p>It felt like defeat, or at least like an extremely poor negotiating tactic, but he brightened so much she couldn't quite bring herself to regret what she'd said. She knew she should. It would be better for both of them if she could just disengage completely, and they could spend their time doing something besides tearing each other apart. But he knew all her weak points and exactly how to exploit them to keep her from walking away.</p><p>And fine, she had to concede the possibility that she <em>had</em> been the slightest bit hasty in jumping to conclusions, and there <em>could </em>be some other explanation for his behavior. He could, for example, be lying to her in a less malicious way than she had thought.</p><p>She rehearsed, yet again, what she knew for sure: he had vanished for six months, ignoring her many heartfelt, desperate pleas for him to talk to her. Even without saying a word, he'd been lying to her that whole time about the nature and purpose of everything he was doing. He'd displayed utter contempt for both their personal and professional relationships, throwing them away as if they meant nothing, then having the audacity to call her his partner while admitting he'd entirely excluded her from the planning and execution of an elaborate trap to catch the man she'd spent years hunting alongside him, right up until he wanted to pick her back up like a chess piece and move her into position. He had proved that there was virtually nothing he wouldn't do to catch Red John - he'd buried a man alive, sacrificed the job and friendships he'd built at the CBI, spent months reprising the very same fake psychic tricks he claimed to revile, and made love to a woman he knew to be in league with his wife's killer.</p><p>He had not even once throughout it all trusted her with the truth, but now he expected her to suddenly trust him with her heart, something he'd never shown any interest in before. Yet even in that regard he hadn't managed to keep his story straight: <em>Love you</em>… <em>What did I say? I was kinda hyped up… I'm in love with you. I have been for a long time.</em> It was like he was pulling petals off a flower, saying I love her, I love her not, I love her. And then he was shocked and dismayed if she didn't just blindly accept whatever he'd said last.</p><p>The pieces of him didn't add up anymore. And she had spent long enough as a cop, had dealt with enough seemingly good, upstanding, delightfully charming men who turned out - once they were cornered and the mask of civility slipped away - to be cold-blooded monsters, to know that when a person showed you their true face, you should never let yourself forget it. Jane had shown her plenty about what he was really made of lately, and she did not intend to let his pretty words pull the wool back over her eyes.</p><p>She remembered the icy contempt on his face when he'd said <em>I would ask her to marry me if I thought she'd buy it.</em> That had been true. That had been the real him.</p><p>He was a world class liar who, by his own admission, hadn't even been willing to change his ways for the wife and daughter he loved. The chances that he would do so for her seemed slim to nonexistent, and the fact that he was so desperate to persuade her of it made the whole business even fishier.</p><p>Her gaze flicked over to him and away again. He looked so goddamn familiar, so much like the person she'd once thought she knew so well. If there was even the slightest chance that he might really be telling the truth… But no. Hoping was only going to make it that much worse when it all came crashing down again. She would hear him out, but she wouldn't do the job of convincing herself for him.</p><p>At that point, the door buzzed open and a prison guard brought them a woman who was very much not Lorelei Martins.</p><hr/><p>Lisbon let Jane drive on the way back to the office because she thought he needed a distraction. She snuck glances at him, trying to discern how he was coping with Lorelei's disappearance. It was the first time she'd really looked at him in several days - she'd been avoiding him in every way possible lately.</p><p>He looked tired, she thought. And he looked sad, and upset. But there was an air of determination about him which she didn't quite recognize, which was distinct from his Red John mania or the intensity he radiated in the midst of one of his schemes.</p><p>"Would you believe me," he asked, "if I told you that in addition to being angry and frustrated about losing Lorelei, I'm also just a little bit relieved?"</p><p>"I don't know," she said.</p><p>He was drumming an anxious rhythm on the steering wheel with his fingers. She glanced at his hands, then did a double take when her brain caught up to what she wasn't seeing. "You're not wearing your ring," she observed.</p><p>"It was a token of my allegiance to my beloved dead," he explained. "They are no longer where my first loyalty lies. So I took it off."</p><p>She tried to process this. If the move was part of a con, it was a bolder one than she'd anticipated. But then, he'd just spent six months living in self-imposed exile as an alcoholic grifter. Removing a wedding band was, in comparison, small potatoes.</p><p>"What does that mean?" she demanded. "You're relieved to lose Lorelei, catching Red John isn't your top priority now. So what? You're not hunting him down anymore? You're taking a little sabbatical from it? You're only doing it part time?"</p><p>"Red John wouldn't let me walk away even if I wanted to," Jane pointed out. "I'll never be free while he is. So we have to get him. But then what? He's extracted Lorelei from federal custody. He's killed both agents and prisoners with impunity within the CBI on multiple occasions. He's hacked our systems, manipulated evidence, and gotten inside information on CBI and FBI investigations. You really think we can hold him and try him? I don't. I believe this doesn't end until he's dead."</p><p>"So nothing's changed for you after all."</p><p>"No," he countered, "none of what I said is about me, it's just the facts of the situation. What's changed for me is that I still need him gone but I care about what comes after. I want him dead in a way that doesn't result in me dying or going to prison or in you hating me. And I've recognized that his death isn't the <em>only</em> thing I want."</p><p>"You said you wanted to do to him what he did to your family."</p><p>"It's a nice fantasy. I'm not going to lie to you and say I don't want to watch him suffer. But torturing him would be pretty hard to pass off as self defense. It probably won't be practical when it comes down to it."</p><p>"Hmm." She found she was relieved that he wasn't claiming he'd given up entirely. She couldn't have even tried to believe it if he'd said he was quitting the revenge business. But he would have known she wouldn't find it plausible, so he wouldn't have said it in the first place. Like every thought about him, it just led in circles. "So how does this even work?" she asked.</p><p>"How does what work?"</p><p>"Me considering the possibility that you might be telling the truth."</p><p>He took a breath and blew it out, then shot her an inscrutable glance. "You're an investigator, aren't you? So investigate the theory that I actually do love you."</p><p>"How am I supposed to do that?"</p><p>"The same way you'd investigate anything else. Collect evidence. Interview witnesses."</p><p>"And what role do you play in all this?"</p><p>He grinned. "I'll offer evidence for your consideration. And, of course, make myself available for interrogation at your convenience."</p><p>"Great," she said, rolling her eyes, but privately she felt the first stirrings of hope. She'd seen him get himself get acquitted of murder, she knew exactly how easily he could bend an inquiry around to suit his purposes. But at least it was terrain she knew how to navigate.</p><p>"If you tamper with evidence or witnesses, you automatically lose," she warned him.</p><p>"Duly noted," he replied.</p><p>She relaxed back into her seat and began to ponder her line of attack.</p><hr/><p>It was just past five when Lisbon got back to her office after dropping off the last of the Karlsen paperwork and found a pastry bag and a cup from her favorite coffee shop on her desk, along with a sealed manila envelope marked "Exhibit 1" in Jane's handwriting.</p><p>When she looked up, the man himself was standing in her doorway. He rocked back on his heels and smiled sheepishly. "I wasn't sure if you'd be more put out by me bringing up personal matters at work or by me showing up at your apartment for the third night in a row, so I split the difference. We are," he ostentatiously checked his bare wrist, "officially off the clock."</p><p>So that was how he was playing it, she thought. Witness the return of charming, harmless Jane, her old friend. It was the persona he liked to use to lull her into complaisance, because it was so soothingly, undemandingly good-humored that it seemed like terribly bad manners to shout at him when he was like this.</p><p>It was tempting to just give up and smile back at him.</p><p>It was exhausting to stay so angry for so long. It was exhausting to scour every word that came out of his mouth for evidence of trickery.</p><p>And he knew it, the bastard, and he was using it against her, hoping that she'd eventually cave just because it was so much easier than constantly building up the wall between them even as he attempted to dismantle it from his side.</p><p>If she'd stopped to think about it, she wouldn't have expected anything different. She'd said she would continue working with him, and Patrick Jane had never had a strictly professional relationship with anyone in his life. He viewed other people's boundaries as invitations to meddle. Either he'd barge right through them, or he'd press just a little and then retreat, over and over, like the waves of a rising tide, and before you knew it you were knee deep in him.</p><p>She felt another headache coming on.</p><p>While she pondered the problem of him, he'd made himself at home on her couch.</p><p>"Drink your latte, it'll make you feel better," he told her.</p><p>She picked up the drink and tossed it into the trash. She didn't want to feel better. She wanted to feel exactly as uncomfortable around him as she should be. She pointed at the envelope with his so-called evidence. "What's this?"</p><p>"Open it and see."</p><p>She unclasped the flap and pulled out the paper inside. "This is my statement from the Dinkler case," she said, and looked up at him.</p><p>"Part of it," he said. "Specifically the part pertaining to the half hour you had Gupta's bomb strapped to your chest."</p><p>"And what is this supposed to be evidence of, exactly?"</p><p>He leaned forward, pinning her with his gaze from across the room. "That you are more important to me than anything else. I know me just saying the words won't mean anything to you now, so I wanted to find concrete examples, and this was at the top of the list. As you'll recall, you couldn't get me away from you when you tried."</p><p>Her nose wrinkled. "Why was that? I gave you an order, once we had Gupta cornered at the gas station. You made up some sheep dip about not wanting to look cowardly, as I recall."</p><p>"I couldn't leave if there was any chance I might be able to do something for you, even if it was just to keep you from dying alone." He looked down. "If you'd been killed, I wouldn't have wanted to live anyway. Not even to get Red John."</p><p>Lisbon pursed her lips and carefully reread her own statement. "Gupta was connected to Red John, though," she pointed out. "He was tracking down Hightower for him. Maybe you were hoping he'd let something slip during the confrontation. Maybe that's why you didn't want to leave."</p><p>"We didn't know that yet then." At her raised eyebrow, he went on, "All right, it seemed like there was some hinky conspiracy-type thing afoot, I thought Gupta wasn't working alone and that bit about him claiming to have a religion I wouldn't understand caught my attention, but I guessed maybe he was linked to Visualize or something. It wasn't a lead I was going to stake my life on. Much less yours. And believe it or not, I had more pressing things on my mind than which mysterious criminal enterprise had developed a sudden interest in Cash in Motion records."</p><p>She looked back at the paper in her hands, mostly as a pretext to look away from him. It was true, she remembered, that for that entire stretch of time, Jane had never once looked even tempted to remove himself from her blast radius, despite his palpable fear at her predicament. Had never shown any concern for anything beyond her safety. And she would not, while she had been living those moments or even in retrospect, have traded his presence at her side for anyone else's, not Cho's, not even Bosco's back in the good old days before everything came between them.</p><p>"It's possible you cared about me then but your feelings changed afterward," she said.</p><p>"When? Why?" he asked, his voice unexpectedly gentle. "Is your theory really that I used to value you more than my own life, then for unknown reasons grew to hate you instead, and so decided to exact revenge for whatever it was you don't remember doing to me by pretending to love you just as much as I did before?"</p><p>"It's not exactly a high bar to clear," she muttered. "Some days you seem to value a cup of tea more than your own life."</p><p>He rose from the couch with all his usual grace. "Only if it's a really special cup of tea," he said lightly. "And with that, I bid you good night."</p><p>She squinted at him. "Actually good night, or good night until you start banging on my door at some ungodly hour of the morning?"</p><p>"Actually good night," he affirmed, smiling. "I've decided you're more likely to have mercy on me if I let you get a bit of sleep now and then."</p><p>"Hmph," she said, and straightened the papers on her desk, and when she raised her head again, he was gone.</p><p>She leaned back in her chair and chastised herself for being a fool. Already she was engaging with him, having private conversations with him, and he hadn't even convinced her of anything yet. She could see where this was heading, and that it would bring her nothing but misery and regrets, and yet she could not seem to deviate from the course he laid out for her.</p><p>Lisbon sighed and picked up the pastry bag on her desk. It contained a chocolate eclair. She hadn't even known she was in the mood for one of those.</p><p>Well, she supposed there wasn't any point in throwing it out now that Jane wasn't around to appreciate the gesture.</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0004"><h2>4. Chapter 4</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  <strong>Day 4:</strong>
</p><p>Lisbon had managed to get to sleep at a reasonable hour the night before, but this only resulted in her waking up before dawn. She lay in bed, unable to find rest again, unable to will herself into motion, feeling like a shark that had stopped swimming and was slowly sinking deeper and deeper in the black depths of the ocean, trying and failing to breathe.</p><p>She did not, she found, know how to live in a world where Jane was her enemy. Nothing felt real or sane, not the malice she had attributed to him in her anger or the pretty stories he had told her to win her back.</p><p>When her alarm finally went off, she forced herself out of bed and brought herself to heel. She wasn't the wan heroine of some Gothic romance who retreated to her fainting couch when the brooding man of the story turned out to have an ongoing entanglement with a murderous madwoman.</p><p>She might not be able to handle a Jane who loved her or one who hated her, but she did know how to manage an investigation in which they had contradictory theories. And it was going to be her investigation, not his.</p><p>By the time she arrived at work, she had a plan. She didn't like it, but there was no way around it. There were only three witnesses who could plausibly shed light on Jane's feelings for her, and though she hated having to drag them into this, she didn't see that she had much choice.</p><p>Well, as outlandishly unprofessional requests went, this was at least better than "Please help me fake my own death. Oh, and yours too Rigsby." Besides, if she and Jane didn't resolve their differences one way or the other, their friction would disrupt the whole team's work.</p><p>So she made the necessary arrangements. She sent Jane off on a series of errands that would take him at least a couple of hours to complete, instructed Ted at security to text her when he returned just in case he decided to disobey orders, and reserved an interrogation room.</p><p>When Cho, Rigsby and Van Pelt assembled there as she'd asked, they found the sheet of paper she'd left with her instructions.</p><p>Cho picked it up and read it to the others. "I need a favor from the three of you. Jane and I are having a serious disagreement that you may be able to help resolve. I know this is, to say the least, an unconventional request, and if you feel uncomfortable fulfilling it, you need not participate. But I believe that you each have a unique and valuable perspective on the issue at stake. What I want is for the three of you to act as a focus group and mutually discuss and debate what you have observed Jane's feelings toward me to be. Please consider the full spectrum of possibilities from hate to love to indifference. I am not present as I do not wish to inadvertently influence your thought processes or constrain what you feel free to say. You are not being recorded. If you are willing to accept this assignment, once you've finished, you can report your conclusion to me in any manner you see fit. With appreciation, Lisbon."</p><p>He looked up. "Well? You guys game?"</p><p>Rigsby frowned. "Boss wants us to sit around gossip about her and Jane? What do you think is going on with the two of them?"</p><p>Van Pelt laughed. "You mean besides him disappearing for six months, having Boss fake her own death, sleeping with Red John's messenger, antagonizing the entire FBI, and acting like even more of a jackass than usual?"</p><p>"Yeah."</p><p>Cho took a seat. "Weren't you paying attention to what she wrote? They're fighting about his feelings for her. He clearly said something on the topic she didn't like. But we're not here to speculate."</p><p>His gaze flicked up to the one-way mirror he was facing, and on the other side of it, Lisbon smiled. She'd known she could count on him.</p><p>Van Pelt and Rigsby took the chairs across from him.</p><p>"So how're we gonna do this?" Rigsby asked.</p><p>"Let's start from the obvious and work from there," Cho decided briskly. "He's definitely not indifferent to her."</p><p>"No way," Rigsby agreed. "Messing with her is like his number one hobby." He paused briefly. "Except maybe for plotting against Red John? Anyhow, nobody spends that much time focused on someone they have no feelings for."</p><p>"He bought a couch for her office so he could be more comfortable in her personal space," Grace put in. "If a normal coworker did that, it would be borderline stalking behavior."</p><p>"She uses the couch too," Rigsby countered. "I think it was kind of sweet."</p><p>"So we agree has feelings for her," Cho said. "Are they positive or negative?"</p><p>"Why can't they be both?" Van Pelt asked. "I mean, he gets frustrated and annoyed when he thinks she's being too by-the-book, he resents it sometimes when she tries to exert authority over him, he acts like a jerk half the time just for the heck of it, but he also cares about her in his own weird way."</p><p>"What's the evidence he cares?" Cho asked.</p><p>"The way he looks at her?" Rigsby suggested. "Well, ways really. There's the sad, longing look when he thinks no one's watching, the contented look when they're getting along and not even bickering, the smug-yet-happy look when they <em>are</em> bickering -"</p><p>"The way he looks at her ass while she's walking away," Grace added.</p><p>"I'm not sure that counts as affection," Rigsby objected delicately.</p><p>"Oh, it's <em>definitely</em> an affectionate look," Van Pelt said. "And as much as he likes pushing her buttons, he <em>really</em> doesn't like it when she's actually upset with him." She sniffed. "Not that he can ever just apologize and talk it through like a functional adult."</p><p>They fell silent for a moment.</p><p>"It's not just the looks," Rigsby said. He glanced at Van Pelt and then away again. "We all know someone can pretend to care about you but not mean it, or kind of mean it but mostly be pursuing an ulterior agenda. I don't think you can necessarily tell by how someone acts under normal circumstances. You have to look at what he does when the chips are down. When his life is on the line, or hers is, or what he wants most is up for grabs."</p><p>Another silence.</p><p>"There was the time he shot Dumar Tanner to save her," Van Pelt said. "Tanner could have led him to Red John."</p><p>"There was the time Red John wanted her head in a box and he went with a melon in a wig instead," Cho observed.</p><p>"<em>Has</em> he ever screwed her over when it really counted?" Rigsby asked.</p><p>"Well, he did bail on her for six months while she worried herself sick," Van Pelt said. "And he has nearly gotten her fired on more than one occasion."</p><p>"But he always got her job back again." Rigsby rubbed his head. "I dunno. Jane's a slippery one. He's got more cylinders in his engine than most of us, but half of them are misfiring on any given day."</p><p>Cho scowled slightly. "He's a piece of work is what he is. But if he hates Boss, he's the best actor I've ever seen."</p><p>They all exchanged a look. "But I mean… <em>isn't</em> he the best actor you've ever seen?" Rigsby asked. "Do you think we ever actually know what's going on with him?"</p><p>Another silence.</p><p>"Come on, no one's <em>that</em> good," Van Pelt said at last. "I'm still pissed as hell for what he put us all through, but - look, I'll say it if you won't. He's not Craig." She pulled herself up straighter. "Tell me the truth - did either of you have doubts about Craig?"</p><p>"I wasn't sure he really loved you," Rigsby muttered.</p><p>"I thought he was a dick," Cho said.</p><p>"I had doubts about him," Van Pelt said. "But I didn't want to admit it to myself. I thought - I thought I was just being silly." She took a breath. "But the point is, I don't have doubts about Jane. I mean, I have a <em>lot</em> of doubts about Jane. But not about this. The thing about Craig was - he made everything too easy. He made it easy to be with him, easy to get swept away, easy to forget my doubts. He never let anything get in the way of how he wanted me to feel. He pressured me sometimes, if he wanted me to tell him something or to move our relationship along faster, but we never had normal fights, because we disagreed or I got on his nerves or whatever. Nothing real is that simple. And you can say a lot of things about Jane and the Boss. But you can't say he makes it simple and easy for her."</p><p>Rigsby's hand twitched like he wanted to reach out to her, but he didn't.</p><p>They all sat with Grace's words for a little while, and then Cho said, "So he's not indifferent and he doesn't hate her. What about love?"</p><p>Rigsby laughed nervously. "Oh boy… that's a can of worms. Don't think I want to go there."</p><p>"I think he cares about her more than he wants to," Van Pelt said, "and it makes him uncomfortable so he pushes her away." She shrugged. "If he doesn't love her, he's an idiot. But then, he's definitely an idiot, so who knows. Maybe one day he'll pull his head far enough out of his ass to see what's right in front of him."</p><p>"What do you think?" Rigsby asked Cho.</p><p>His lips compressed. "I think what he feels matters less than how he acts. He acts like he's forgotten how to be a human being, if he ever knew." He glanced up at the mirror again. "Someone can genuinely love you and still be nothing but bad for you. Love doesn't mean there's a happy ending."</p><p>None of them had a response to that.</p><p>Eventually Rigsby said, "Guess that about covers it. So… what're we gonna tell Boss?"</p><p>Cho snorted. "She's been listening the whole time, dumbass. That bit about reporting back is just a polite fiction so we can all pretend she doesn't know everything we just said."</p><p>"Right, but what do we tell her?"</p><p>Cho sighed. "I'll take care of it."</p><p>Van Pelt and Rigsby got up and left the interrogation room, talking quietly amongst themselves. After a minute, Cho tapped the instruction sheet against the table once, stood up, and knocked on the observation room door.</p><p>Lisbon opened it immediately.</p><p>"You hear what you needed to?" he asked, handing her the paper back.</p><p>"Yeah." She met his eyes. "Thank you, Cho. I mean it."</p><p>"I meant it too," he said, and walked away.</p><p>A few minutes later, Lisbon returned to her own office and fed the piece of paper into her shredder. As she watched the machine suck it down, she realized that the more she understood what was going on, the less she knew what to do about it.</p>
<hr/><p>She knocked on the door of Jane's hotel room that evening with a sense of grim uneasiness. When he'd asked her to come by after work for a witness interview, she'd agreed readily enough. She had some things to say to him, and if they were at his place instead of hers, she could get away from him when she was done without having to threaten him with jail time to get him out of her hair.</p><p>He opened the door with a smile, appearing perfectly relaxed. He was still in his vest, but he'd taken off his jacket and rolled up his shirt sleeves, and his hair was just a little mussed. He looked unfairly good, but that was nothing new, and despite the twinge of instinctive desire that rippled through her, she brushed past him without reacting, and began to inspect his space.</p><p>It looked just the same as it had before his sojourn in Vegas: a book on the nightstand, an electric kettle on the counter, a neatly made bed. She turned away from it and caught sight of an open bottle of red wine and two glasses on the coffee table by the couch.</p><p>"Interrogation with a side of Syrah?" she commented. "How civilized." She considered adding something about what comforts Lorelei could look forward to if she ever resurfaced, but decided it would just make her seem petty.</p><p>He looked down. "I guess I just wanted to pretend it could be a conversation between two friends."</p><p>Lisbon stiffened her back. She really hated his kicked-puppy routine. She wondered, briefly, if the wine was meant to lower her barriers, and if so whether that counted as trying to cheat or just trying to get through to her. "So who's the cop and who's the suspect tonight?" she asked.</p><p>He made a moue of distaste. "I have a few questions I'd like to ask you. Who, after all, is a better witness to your own experience than you are? But if you want to switch it up, go ahead."</p><p>He poured the wine and handed her a glass.</p><p>She took a sip. It was, unsurprisingly, excellent.</p><p>He gestured toward the couch, but she remained standing. "Look," she said, "I've done some thinking, and I have something to say to you."</p><p>He smiled blandly. "So the team had something helpful to tell you this afternoon?"</p><p>She waved this away and took another sip of wine. "I think I was wrong," she said. "I don't believe anymore that you set out to con me into thinking you loved me in order to manipulate me."</p><p>"And what brought this realization about?" he inquired.</p><p>She looked him in the face. "If you'd been trying to do that," she said, "you would have succeeded. It wouldn't have been hard. A few heartfelt assurances, some lovelorn looks, maybe throw in a kiss, I would have bought it no problem. Even factoring in the Lorelei thing, you could have explained that away, talked me through it. I know how persuasive you can be when you set your mind to it. But you didn't do any of that. You blew hot and cold, you let Lorelei spring herself on me with no warning, you went right back to being a brooding, uncommunicative, superior jerk."</p><p>She took another drink. "I tried to rationalize all that. I thought maybe you just had so much contempt for me you didn't think you needed to do a proper job of pretending to keep me at your beck and call. I thought maybe you got cold feet about having to ever follow through on what you said, so you back-pedaled and tried to lower my expectations while still keeping me on the hook." She shrugged. "But that didn't add up either. If this really was about Red John, you wouldn't have taken any chances. You certainly didn't half-ass it with Lorelei." She took a breath. "So I must have been wrong. It wasn't a con. It was just… you flailing around, making a mess of things, saying the wrong thing, then overcompensating in the other direction. And I made the mistake of taking you seriously, instead of realizing you were just saying whatever sheep dip sprang to mind in the moment without worrying about the consequences."</p><p>He continued studying her face for a few moments after she stopped talking. "So if I understand you correctly, you no longer believe that I've just been using you, but you also don't believe that I love you."</p><p>She nodded uncomfortably.</p><p>"But then what about everything I've been saying to you for the past few days?" he asked, taking a seat at on the couch. "What do you make of that?"</p><p>Lisbon perched on the opposite end of the couch and took a sip of wine. "You're not exactly in a stable place right now, Jane," she said, avoiding his gaze. "You spent six months burning your life down in a scheme that fell apart at the last second, leaving you with nothing but Lorelei who's now also gone. Then I freaked out on you and made you think you were losing the old life you were hoping to reclaim, and you overreacted. Maybe you're trying to give me what you think I want to hold onto me. Maybe you missed me a little while you were gone and made up some exaggerated story for yourself about your feelings."</p><p>"Hmm." Jane cocked his head. "And where does that leave us now?"</p><p>She tapped a fingernail against her wineglass. "We can just go back to normal and forget all this," she suggested. "I'm your boss, you're my consultant, sometimes when you don't get on my last nerve we're something like friends."</p><p>"No," he said.</p><p>"Excuse me?"</p><p>"We can't just go back to normal. For one thing," he said, "you don't trust me."</p><p>She rolled her eyes. "Of course I don't trust you. You're untrustworthy. There's nothing you wouldn't lie to me about if it suited your purposes. There's very little you haven't lied to me about already."</p><p>"Also," he continued, "I do love you, and I think it's important for you to know that."</p><p>He picked up the wine bottle and held it out to top up her glass.</p><p>"You're not drinking yours," she said suspiciously.</p><p>"Eh. I did a lot of drinking in Vegas. It put me off the stuff a bit." He put the bottle back down and gave her a guarded look. "I want to ask you a few more questions," he said. "So I know where we stand."</p><p>She gestured for him to go proceed.</p><p>"After I told you Red John wanted me to kill you… did you wonder if I might do it?"</p><p>"No," she said honestly.</p><p>"Never?" he asked. "Not even when I was about to shoot you? It didn't cross your mind that there might be real bullets in the gun?"</p><p>She frowned. "Is that what you were trying to distract me from by saying what you did? No, I knew they were blanks, why would I have been afraid?"</p><p>"I wasn't trying to do<em> anything</em> by saying that, woman. I was afraid for you - I don't like guns, much less pointing them at someone I care about, and the only people I'd ever fired at before were all dead - and I just <em>said</em> it. I talk when I'm frightened, you know that. But returning to the point, you didn't <em>know</em> they were blanks. I could have switched them out for live ammo, it would have been easy."</p><p>"Well, it didn't occur to me at the time," she said testily.</p><p>"So you trust me with your life," he pointed out. "You trust that I wouldn't actually murder you to get Red John."</p><p>"Sure, I guess." She shrugged. "Besides, if you'd wanted to really kill me, why tell me about it and go to all the trouble of setting up a scene in the middle of the CBI? It would have been much easier to just ask me to meet you somewhere out of the way and quietly slit my throat."</p><p>"That's one way to look at it," he muttered.</p><p>She put her glass down and rubbed her arms. "But Jane," she said, "I still don't get what you want to happen here. You want me to trust you, you want me to believe you love me - what then? We just go on as usual but with some private understanding? Or do you actually aim to start up some kind of relationship with Red John watching our every move?" A cold wave of dread washed over her. She stood up and began to pace. "Oh my God," she said, "is that the whole point of this? Is this Plan B? First you tried to fool him into thinking you'd given up so he'd approach you, but that didn't do the trick, so now you want to incite him another way? Shack up with the very woman he told you to kill? You and I do the whole loving couple routine until he decides to punish you for being happy, and you set a trap to catch him when he comes to get his revenge by cutting me into pieces? But you can't just ask me to play along, can you? I'm not a good enough actress, right? So I have to believe it too."</p><p>"No!" Jane's face was white, his fists clenched. "I would never use you as bait. I would never risk you that way. Why do you think I was too afraid to admit how I felt about you until now? I didn't want to make the target on your back any bigger than it already is!"</p><p>"He asked for my corpse, Jane!" she shouted. "Exactly how much bigger do you think it can get?"</p><p>"Big enough for him to decide to do the job himself," he said quietly. "That's the nightmare scenario. That's why I was willing to do anything else - even risk you hating me - to finally be done with him."</p><p>"I'm a cop, Jane," she said impatiently. "I can keep myself safe."</p><p>"Bosco and his team were cops too," he reminded her. "Rebecca was killed in the presence of two armed guards. If Red John really wanted you dead, he could make it happen."</p><p>She sighed and dropped back onto the couch. "So then why not just let me hate you?" she asked. "If telling me how you claim to feel is such a big risk, why are you taking it?"</p><p>He shrugged helplessly. "It turned out I could tolerate the possibility of you hating me, but not the reality of it. Not when I saw how much it was hurting you too."</p><p>She didn't know quite what to make of that. Her mind circled back to the possibility of luring Red John out instead. "It might not be a bad plan, actually," she mused, "the faking a relationship gag. As long as I was in on it. We'd need lots of surveillance, obviously, and trackers on me in case he successfully kidnapped me - we'd want redundancy there, maybe Van Pelt would have some ideas, but -"</p><p>"<em>No!"</em></p><p>She glanced up, surprised. Jane looked like he might throw up.</p><p>He grabbed her arm, his gaze drilling into her face. "If you and I ever have a romantic relationship," he said hoarsely, "it will not be fake, it will not be for Red John's benefit, and it <em>will not put your life at risk!</em>" He let go of her and hunched in on himself. "Do you not understand that what you're suggesting is literally the stuff of my nightmares?"</p><p>"Fine," she mumbled, suppressing the urge to make a joke of it.</p><p>"We will get Lorelei back," he said a little desperately. "We will get her to talk. We'll use that good old-fashioned police work of yours. And when we set the trap that catches him, it will not involve any of us getting kidnapped, all right?"</p><p>"And you not getting any of your fingers lopped off?" she added acerbically. "It's not like you're exactly known for playing it safe."</p><p>He picked up his glass of wine and drained most of it without seeming to taste it. "I'm not the one of us that matters," he said.</p><p>You matter to me, she thought automatically, and though she didn't say it out loud, she was sure he could read it off her face. She wondered if that was why he'd said it in the first place - to watch her react and see if she still cared.</p><p>She was fed up with him again, with how he'd screwed things up so comprehensively that she couldn't even respond to his well-worn self-loathing without feeling manipulated and defensive.</p><p>"This is pointless," she said. "We can argue about Red John on the clock. Is our interview finished, or did you have any other questions?"</p><p>"No, I'm done for now," he said morosely.</p><p>She nodded and stood up, glancing around to see if she'd put down any of her belongings. But no, she hadn't made herself at home. "Good night, then," she said, and let herself out.</p><p>In the hotel's parking lot, she took a deep breath before opening her car door. It felt like there was more oxygen in the air than there had been in Jane's room. She was relieved to be away from him, yet a piece of her was reluctant to leave. Things felt so unfinished, so unresolved.</p><p>She told herself she had no reason to expect they'd ever again be otherwise. This might now be the best she could hope for with him - the sense that neither of them was actively plotting against the other.</p><p>At least tonight she thought he most likely did in fact care if she lived or died. She wouldn't have said as much a couple of days ago. But whether or not he valued her life, he was still Patrick Jane: a cheat, a habitual liar, an unreliable, unstable, self-absorbed manipulator, emotionally crippled by years of unrelenting grief and guilt and hate.</p><p>She'd been a fool for ever having expected him to behave any differently. It was like the fable about the frog and the scorpion. He probably hadn't ever even really wanted to hurt her.</p><p>It was just his nature.</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0005"><h2>5. Chapter 5</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  <strong>Day 5:</strong>
</p><p>Lisbon woke at dawn and, unable to get back to sleep, found herself rereading Jane's letter yet again as she blearily sipped a cup of coffee. It plucked at her heartstrings just as it was meant to, but she still couldn't make head or tails of which parts were true and which false or deliberately misleading. She felt like she was missing something, some decoder ring that would reveal the secret message beneath the words.</p><p>Then it occurred to her that she was looking at it all wrong. In Jane's absence, she'd slipped back into thinking of truth as binary - yes or no, ball or strike. But that wasn't how Jane played the game. He wasn't some big slugger aiming for the fences and swinging through anything out of the zone. He was Ted Williams, not Barry Bonds. He was the bat control guy, the situational hitter, the one who knew not just how fast the lead runner was, but how good an arm the center fielder had, how far from the line the third baseman had strayed, how to adjust his approach depending on the number of outs, the count on him after each pitch - he was the guy who could dig a filthy curveball out from his shoelaces and dunk it over the infielders for a go-ahead hit, time after time. It wasn't just about what the pitcher threw, it was about everyone on the whole field at the moment he swung his bat.</p><p>For Jane, talking wasn't about truth or lies, it was about advancing the state of play. Moving the situation forward in the direction he wanted. To make sense of what he was saying to her, she had to see the context and she had to understand the goal. But she didn't even know what color jersey he was wearing, much less whether he might be trying to set up a suicide squeeze or induce a balk.</p><p>And when she'd tried to ask about some of that the evening before, she'd immediately gotten sidetracked instead. Well, if he could harass her at any hour of the day or night, she could return the favor.</p><p>He picked up his phone on the third ring. "Lisbon?" he said by way of greeting. He sounded tired. She decided she didn't care if she'd woken him. Probably it was better anyway if she had him half-asleep, with some of his defenses down.</p><p>"Well look at that," she said. "You remember how to answer a phone after all."</p><p>"To what do I owe the pleasure?" he asked.</p><p>"I tried to ask you a question last night," she said, "but I never really gave you a chance to answer. So I'm asking again now."</p><p>"What was the question?" There was a rustling sound on the other end of the line. She tried very hard not to imagine what might be causing it.</p><p>"All this crap with the two of us - what's the goal here? Where are you trying to get with me?"</p><p>He sighed. "I don't know."</p><p>"Wrong answer," she snapped. "Try again."</p><p>"I know you think of me as the man with a plan, but right now it's like - like asking a person running away from a lion why he's heading east and not west. It's not about where he wants to go, it's about where the lion isn't."</p><p>"Maybe back when we first started fighting it was like that," she allowed, "but at a certain point the man changes his course a little to head toward a village with a good sturdy wall, or a tree he can climb, or the place he left his spear."</p><p>"Lions can climb trees," he said. "But I take your point. To stretch the metaphor further, say the man is a traveler far from home. He doesn't know where to find a village, and he doesn't know if the people there will let him inside the walls if he does come across one. He just - maybe he sees smoke in the distance, and he hopes whatever he'll find when he gets there will save him."</p><p>"I'm not a village of strangers, Jane," she said impatiently. "You know me. You know all the local landmarks."</p><p>"No, the unknown territory isn't you - it's me." He paused. "You can't have any idea how disorienting it is, trying to make sense of a world where my single overarching purpose no longer has its whips at my back, yet I still can't get around it. I ruined the thing that mattered most to me - again - and I don't know how to get it back, even though you're still alive. I wish I did, Teresa. I wish I had a plan. All I have is this - you used to care for me, and you used to trust me when it counted, and even though you don't see it anymore, I'm still the same person I used to be, except a little less blind. And maybe if I just hold still right in front of you and let you get a good look at me, you'll recognize me again."</p><p>She breathed in, and out. She tried to think if any of that helped. No. "You don't understand," she said, "it's not about who you are right now. It's that everything I ever thought I knew about you has come unglued. If I can't trust you now, then everything could have been a lie, all along. There's no solid ground. There's nothing I can go back to and say, it was real up until then. I always knew you lied to me, but I would tell myself that there were limits. That you came through when it really mattered. But when I stopped and tried to find those limits, I couldn't. You didn't just lie to me about little incidental things, you lied to me about everything that mattered most, even if it was by omission. And now that I understand that, it's like you're lost in a hall of distorted mirrors - I can see a hundred different twisted versions of you and they're all equally real and unreal, and they were all there all along."</p><p>"I'm sorry," he said. "I'm sorry you're going through this. But I promise, you did know who I really was. You do know me. You're the only one who does."</p><p>"I wish I could believe that." She took a sip of her forgotten coffee and tried to figure out how their conversation had ended up so far from what she'd called him to ask. "Wait a second," she said sharply. "Am I the lion?"</p><p>"What?"</p><p>"In your belabored metaphor about your plans or lack thereof," she explained, "you're the man running from the lion, and also the land you're running through, and you said I wasn't the village of strangers, so that only leaves the lion. Am I the thing you're running away from in fear of death?"</p><p>"Of course not!"</p><p>"Then what am I? And what's the lion?"</p><p>"The lion is - the lion is losing you and being alone forever. And you're the opposite of that. You're getting to keep breathing."</p><p>"Hmph." It was a nice save, she thought, but a little too smooth. "I'm not <em>air,</em>" she pointed out. "I'm not the absence of a monster. I'm a person. I have volition, much as you like to treat me like a prop you can move around at your convenience." Her ire rose again. "And you breathed just fine without me for six months."</p><p>"It wasn't fine," he said. "It was awful. It was the worst I've felt since - since we met. But the longer it went on, the more I missed you, the more clearly I understood that I had to stay the course. I had to rid myself of Red John and escape the half-life he'd trapped me in. I wanted so badly to finally be able to offer you something real. But by the end of it I would have happily accepted you showing up in Vegas and dragging me back home by my ear, ruining the whole thing, if it just meant I'd get to see you again. When I visited you at your church, I was such a giddy fool. I could barely contain myself, I would have been doing cartwheels if I didn't need to keep from being seen."</p><p>"Yeah, cause Red John finally reached out to you."</p><p>"No, because I was near you again."</p><p>"Hah! You couldn't get out of there fast enough, as soon as I said I'd help."</p><p>"I heard a door open and I ducked," he said, "and then I realized if I stayed any longer, I wouldn't be able to keep from crawling over to your pew and hugging you, and - it would not have been inconspicuous. So I left. I was so juiced up from seeing you I was halfway back to Vegas before it even occurred to me that I'd acted kind of like a jerk."</p><p>She snorted. "Yeah, <em>kind of like</em>."</p><p>"But then it all fell apart," he continued, "and we didn't get Red John, and I was so furious and frustrated and you were right there again but I <em>still</em> couldn't reach out to you, and I took it out on everyone around me, including you, because I'm childish and self-sabotaging, and I obsessed over Lorelei because she was my one remaining escape route, and - well, you know the rest."</p><p>It was a good story. He always came up with good stories to rationalize his bad behavior.</p><p>Well, no, she had to admit to herself, usually he didn't even bother to do that. He typically just ignored her complaints entirely or pointed to some goal he'd achieved as if that made how he'd done it inconsequential. His good stories were most often part of a con. If she'd been able to believe anything he'd said to her lately, it would have seemed like some kind of a break-through - this was by far the most communicative she'd ever known him to be. Instead, how uncharacteristic the sudden openness was only made it that much more suspicious. And yet still she had the sense that if she just kept him talking long enough, something useful might come out of it.</p><p>"I know you're a person," he added when it became clear she was going to offer no response. "You're my favorite person. You're the person I love."</p><p>"Would you stop saying that," she snapped.</p><p>"Why?" he asked. "Why does it upset you so much?"</p><p>"Repeating such an obvious lie is insulting to my intelligence," she said. "And it just keeps reminding me of how much it isn't the case, and how much I can't trust you."</p><p>"Why is it so obviously untrue?"</p><p>"Are you kidding me?" she demanded. "Take a look at how you've treated me in the past year or so. Does that seem loving to you? Does that seem like how a person acts toward someone they love? I get that you're used to having me around, maybe you're fond of me the same way you are of those ugly old shoes of yours, fine, but love? Not by any definition I understand."</p><p>"You're not a pair of shoes to me," he said tightly.</p><p>"I think that's exactly what I am. I'm comfortable and familiar and useful, you can walk around on me all day and I keep the world's hard edges from cutting you. I'm a buffer and a convenience, and when you don't need me you can drop me any old place and I'll still be right there waiting when you come back again."</p><p>"I'm sorry." His voice was choked. "I never meant to make you feel that way." There was a wet, gasping breath and it occurred to her that he might be crying.</p><p>"Of course you didn't," she said mercilessly. "Who worries about their shoes' feelings?"</p><p>"What can I do to make it better?" he asked pleadingly. "I'll do anything you ask."</p><p>"Oh sure," she scoffed. "A month ago you couldn't be bothered to pick up your phone so I'd know you were still breathing, but now you'll do anything for me. Yeah, right."</p><p>"Try me," he said. "I mean it. Anything you want from me is yours."</p><p>"And what if what I want is for you to leave me alone? What if I want nothing further to do with you?"</p><p>A pause. Then, "Is that really what you want?" he asked in a small, terrible voice she'd never heard from him before.</p><p>"Yes. No. I don't know." She laughed. "It's what I ought to want. But I'm the one who called you, aren't I?"</p><p>And that was the crux of it, really. Ever since deciding to cut all personal ties, she'd done nothing but continue to talk with him at every opportunity. Even when she hated him, she still wanted to understand him.</p><p>"I'm glad you called," he said miserably.</p><p>"Yeah, it's been a real barrel of laughs."</p><p>"I always want to know what's going on with you. I always want to know what you're thinking and feeling. Even if it's that you can't stand the sight of me, I still want you to tell me."</p><p>The headache that seemed to now be her constant companion stabbed at her temples. She wanted to make a crack about how little interest he'd had in anything she had to say while he'd been in Vegas, but that seemed both like going in circles and like kicking him while he was down.</p><p>She should hang up, she told herself. Talking to him wasn't making her feel any better and wasn't solving anything. But then she would just be alone in her apartment with nothing to think about except how much he made her want to tear her own hair out.</p><p>She adjusted her grip on the phone. "Tell me something true," she said instead. "Something that's got nothing to do with me, and that's trivial enough that you'd have no reason to lie about it."</p><p>Somehow his silence sounded surprised. Then he drew a breath and started, talking a little fast as if to keep her from changing her mind. "Did I ever tell you how Daisy the elephant came into Pete's life? Well, I was about eleven, and the carnival had stopped for a week in southern Oregon, where you wouldn't expect to find a lot of elephants, but…"</p><p>As he launched into his story, which involved a small-time circus that happened to cross their path, an unwise bet in which Pete had not participated, and the complex relationships of approximately eight elephants and their handlers, Lisbon leaned back in her chair and smiled for what felt like the first time in a year.</p><p>She had no idea if any of the story was actually true - she would have bet it was at least embellished for dramatic effect - but if he was lying to her, they were at least harmless lies, meant only to entertain her.</p><p>The story eventually wrapped up, but instead of ending it segued into another one, about a woman who maintained the rides and her feud with a ring toss game operator who traveled with them one season, and then there was another story after that, the carnival slowly unfurling in her mind as he wove his tales, one piece of it laid out after another, peopled with salty characters and petty tricks and odd bits of machinery, Jane and his father only background players, never at the center of events.</p><p>It was almost an hour later when she stopped him. "That's enough, Jane," she said. Then, softly, "Thanks." Over the course of the call she'd migrated from her kitchen to the living room, and now she got up from the couch and paced over to the window, staring through the gap in the curtains without focusing on the world outside. "So how much of that was true, anyway?"</p><p>"All of it! Well, 99%." A chuckle. "Definitely more than 95%."</p><p>Her lips curled up a little. "Okay."</p><p>He sighed. "When I was in Vegas, I would imagine telling you those kinds of things."</p><p>"Really?"</p><p>"Well, not at the beginning," he admitted. "At first I just imagined having conversations with you about my day, about the people I saw and that kind of thing. I'd imagine you scolding me for the things I'd done. Then time went on and you started seeming farther away, and I'd write letters to you in my head instead. I never put a word down on paper, of course, for fear of it being found, but in my unwritten letters I told you how much I missed you, how strange and empty life was without you, how sorry I was every time you called and I didn't answer. Then you stopped calling, and I stopped being able to imagine you being happy to get a letter from me, so I rewrote old memories instead. I'd think back to some long-ago day when you and I were driving somewhere together or puttering around your office after everyone else had gone home, and I'd imagine that instead of brooding about Red John or sulking about you not appreciating one of my brilliant schemes, I'd just talked to you. Told you my stories. Asked you about your brothers or your life in college or what kind of birthday party you had when you turned eight. I was angry at myself for having had so much precious time with you and wasting it with silence and distance, and I told myself that when I came back, things would be different." He gave the ghost of a laugh. "Well, I guess they are."</p><p>She shifted her weight and ran a hand down the edge of the curtain. "When you were away," she confessed, "I used some of your tricks when I was working cases."</p><p>"You did?"</p><p>"Don't get too excited, I didn't try to hypnotize anybody. But I'd guide witnesses to help them remember details they didn't think they'd noticed, and try to spot the things you would have at a crime scene - pick up family photos, what have you. I may have sniffed a corpse or two. I definitely invited myself into a victim's sister's kitchen and fixed myself a cup of coffee."</p><p>"I always knew you had it in you!" She'd guessed he'd be smug, but he sounded utterly delighted instead. Then his voice grew wistful: "I wish I'd been there to see it."</p><p>"Well I wouldn't have had to do it if you'd been there," she said, "and I don't imagine I'll be making any repeat performances until you've disappeared again."</p><p>"I'm not going to disappear again," he assured her.</p><p>"Don't make more promises you can't keep," she warned him.</p><p>"I mean it," he said. "I don't have any intention of leaving you again while I'm still living."</p><p>"You'll forgive me if I don't put much stock in your intentions at the moment," she snapped. "All that does for me is next time you cook up some clever plan, wander off into the night, and don't bother to check in for a year or two, I'll have to imagine you decomposing in a shallow grave right up until you jump out at me from behind a hedge when I'm on my morning run." She glanced at her watch. "Speaking of which, I should go."</p><p>"Of course," he said in the light, unruffled tone she knew concealed darker currents below. "Thank you for the call. Have a good run."</p><p>"Okay, bye," she said, and hung up.</p><hr/><p>Out on the street in her workout gear, she pushed herself to run faster than usual, feet pounding the sidewalk harder and harder, her breathing harsh and rapid. She found a rough pleasure in the exertion, but it didn't bring her the release she was hoping for. She still felt hemmed in. Cornered. Afraid.</p><p>That phone call had been, in a painful, conflicted way, the closest she'd felt to Jane in a long time, and it terrified her. The problem was, she didn't know if it was the bad kind of fear, that paralyzed you when you should be rushing in to subdue a perp, or the good kind of fear, that warned you of an unseen enemy stalking you from the shadows.</p><p>She could see that Jane was luring her within striking distance, that if he kept up his act and she kept handing him opportunities to edge a little closer, sooner or later she would relax her guard and start to believe him. And if she believed him, if she even really <em>hoped</em> she could believe him, then it would all be over. He would own her in a way no one ever had before. He would be able to do anything to her, and she would have no defense against it.</p><p>And she had no doubt that he would break her heart into a thousand pieces. Even if he didn't mean to, even if he didn't want to. Lorelei would reappear, or Red John would send some brutal message, or something else would happen, and Jane would just react. He would seduce a suspect or leave again or self-destruct or get himself killed. He would lie to her and shut her out and say terrible things to her when she tried to stop him. And he would remain stubbornly oblivious to the cost of any of it, to him or to her, until it was all over and he was wandering apologetically through the wreckage of their lives looking for new shards of guilt to drive into his own skin.</p><p>And even knowing all that, even knowing the inevitable outcome, if she believed he loved her, she would let him do it anyway. Unrequited love for Jane wasn't exactly fun, but it was perfectly survivable. She had shields up that significantly limited the potential fallout. She could go on with her life, she could see other men, she could get by when he vanished without a word of warning. She could keep her emotions properly caged. Requited love, she already knew, would be a different beast entirely, one with claws and teeth and toxic venom, like some prehistoric spiny monster found only in Australia.</p><p>It was better not to believe him. It was better to remember that he lied so instinctively he might not even know he was doing it, that he put on disguises as easily as breathing, that he had already betrayed her, that the only thing he'd ever said to her that she wholeheartedly believed was that he intended to let nothing stop him from killing Red John, no matter the consequences.</p><p>She drew up short at a red light and bent over, hands on her thighs, and gave a breathless chuckle as she thought to herself that she'd probably have better luck than Jane would at outrunning a lion.</p><p>And then another thought hit her as his entire wretched metaphor finally clicked into place and she understood, with a sort of strange relief that seemed to tear a hole in her chest, that she didn't have to worry. He wasn't in love with her after all. He'd said explicitly he had no idea what he even wanted from her. He was just afraid of losing her. She supposed she'd become a kind of anchor for him over the years, a source of comfort. He didn't want a relationship with her, he didn't even want to have sex with her, he just didn't want to let go of his security blanket, and as soon as she'd tried to pull it away he'd grabbed after her without even knowing what he was reaching for.</p><p>The light changed, but instead of continuing, she turned around and started walking slowly back the way she'd come. This was good news, she told herself. She could just find a way to reassure him that she would still in some sense be there for him even if she couldn't trust him and certainly was not going to involve him in her personal life, and once he calmed down and came to his senses he'd probably try to hypnotize her to make her forget he'd ever said the word<em> love</em> to her. She might even let him.</p><hr/><p>In the office, Lisbon avoided spending time with Jane. Her anger at him had mostly fizzled out, and the absence of its protective coating left her off balance and unpleasantly aware of him. He seemed to snap in and out of focus from across the bullpen, like a camouflaged animal you could only spot half the time, his shape changeable and confusing. He would look strange and then familiar, like a friend and then a suspect, warm and open or coldly calculating, all without moving an inch.</p><p>Jane, for his part, was on unusually good behavior. He brought in breakfast for the whole team and made efforts to cajole them into forgiving him. He made very little headway with Rigsby, whom Sarah had still not forgiven for his fake death. Cho seemed the most tolerant of him, mainly, Lisbon thought, because of all of them he'd had the lowest expectations of Jane to start with, and therefore had been the least disappointed.</p><p>Jane spent the afternoon digging into their last lingering case from before his return and, annoyingly, cracked the whole thing before the end of the day.</p><p>In the evening, Lisbon went out for drinks with a friend from the SacPD, but she was preoccupied and begged off after the second round. It did not occur to her to try to talk about the Jane situation. In addition to being a generally private person, she'd found early on that trying to explain him or his role in her life to anyone was a losing proposition.</p><p>Back at home, she sat at her kitchen table and cleaned all her weapons, the scent of metal and oil and gunpowder sharp and comforting, a reminder of her own strength. She would get through this, as she had everything else, and wear whatever scars it left without shame.</p><p>She fell asleep easily that night for the first time in weeks.</p><p> </p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>Can you tell I was missing baseball when I wrote this?</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0006"><h2>6. Chapter 6</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  <strong>Day 6:</strong>
</p><p>On Saturday, Lisbon found herself with an unexpected glut of time on her hands. It seemed like it had been weeks since her last day off, and it felt almost wrong not to go to the office. Instead, she spent the first half of the day running errands.</p><p>When Jane called her in the middle of the afternoon and asked to meet, she agreed mainly for lack of any other occupation.</p><p>"If I come to your place, will you let me inside, or would you rather visit the hotel again?" he asked.</p><p>She took a moment to consider. She wasn't going to keep him on the other side of her front door again, but she didn't particularly want him in her space, either, snooping around and making himself comfortable and leaving her with memories of him in places he didn't belong.</p><p>"I'll go over to yours," she decided. "See you in an hour?"</p><p>"I look forward to it."</p><hr/><p>"We should talk about what happened with me and Lorelei," Jane said as soon as she was situated on his couch with a cup of tea she didn't really want but had accepted out of courtesy.</p><p>"No we shouldn't," she replied immediately and with great certainty.</p><p>"Of course we should. You said it yourself a couple of days ago - if I'd been trying to convince you I loved you, I would have explained it all to you before you met her. Well, I do want you to believe I love you, though not for the reasons you imputed to me at the time, so obviously this is a necessary step."</p><p>"It's really not necessary," she insisted.</p><p>"Don't be silly," he said. "You clearly have feelings about what happened between us -" she opened her mouth to protest, but before could he continued, "I have feelings every time <em>you</em> take someone to bed, and I'm sure I'd have many more if Red John were mixed up in it."</p><p>This brought her up short. "You've never cared who I sleep with," she told him.</p><p>He actually laughed at her. "Just because I don't display those feelings, my dear, it doesn't mean I don't have them."</p><p>"Like when?" she demanded incredulously.</p><p>"Every time since we met," he told her. "But you want an example? When I stopped by Mashburn's hotel room and figured out he had you hidden away in there, I wanted to go wreck another one of poor Walter's cars."</p><p>"That's ridiculous - you couldn't possibly be jealous. You practically pushed me into his arms."</p><p>"I know." He rubbed his jaw ruefully. "It was not one of my prouder moments."</p><p>She shook her head in disbelief. "Come on, that doesn't make any sense. Why would you have encouraged me to go out with him if you felt that way?"</p><p>An odd expression chased across his face. "It took me a while to figure that out," he admitted. "But the real reason was - he reminded me of myself." At her confused look, he elaborated, "Come on, he's brash, unconventional, playful, loves to be the center of attention, definitely a far cry from the macho law enforcement types you usually go for, he has a certain roguish charm… You can't tell me that doesn't remind you of anyone else you know." He shrugged. "I wanted you to be tempted by that. I wanted to see if you might be interested in that kind of a man. And by inserting myself into his pursuit of you, I made it even more about myself, to me if not to either of you."</p><p>She grimaced. "That's kind of messed up, Jane."</p><p>"After Angela died… it was hard for me to accept that that side of me hadn't died with her. It seemed like a betrayal to even think of another woman. And even if it wasn't, what did I have to offer anyone? Hi, nice to meet you, I'm Patrick Jane, I'm a conman obsessed with avenging my dead family, my long-term plans involve premeditated murder possibly followed by life in prison - want to go out to dinner? It was easier to just write myself out of the picture, or allow myself to be briefly tempted by women who were themselves so fraudulent and ill-suited to me that there was no chance of significant complications, and no need to feel guilty for indulging in a little flirtation." He took a sip of his own tea. "But I couldn't stop my feelings for you from overflowing their bounds. I pretended they hadn't. But they still came out in odd ways now and then… like with Mashburn."</p><p>Lisbon took a drink of her own tea, not especially caring for the flavor, which seemed at once weak and bitter. Parts of what he'd said made sense to her, but the parts pertaining to her didn't really compute.</p><p>"Are you actually claiming that you've had some kind of long-standing attraction to me?"</p><p>"Of course," he said, as if this had been obvious. "It shouldn't be that hard to believe. I focus a lot of attention on you, you can't have missed that. And I flirted with you."</p><p>"You flirted with everyone."</p><p>"But I meant it with you."</p><p>She rolled her eyes. "No you didn't."</p><p>"Well, not in the sense that I intended to follow through on it. But I certainly meant it in terms of being attracted to you and wanting you to be attracted to me. Wanting to play with you."</p><p>She shifted uncomfortably at that, and took another sip of tea to try and hide it. "You said you wanted to talk about Lorelei."</p><p>His smirk told her how amused he was that they'd found a topic she wanted to avoid even more than that one. "Absolutely."</p><p>She huffed. "So?"</p><p>He rearranged himself on the couch to angle himself slightly toward her. "I want to be clear that I don't have feelings for her."</p><p>"Oh please. You've got plenty of feelings for her."</p><p>"Not romantic feelings."</p><p>Lisbon frowned. "Then why do you keep trying to seduce her?"</p><p>"I'm trying to get her to talk - I'm giving her what she wants from me."</p><p>She shook her head. "No, this is what I was trying to tell you before, but you wouldn't listen. It's not what she wants from you, it's how she's trying to exert power over you. She thinks it's leverage, having been intimate with you. Leverage over you, and a pry bar to use against the two of us - with her obvious delight in telling me about it, and that crack about you being a little in love with me. She has just as much of an agenda as you do."</p><p>"It's a different way of saying the same thing - she wants power over me, I'm letting her think she has it."</p><p>"That's not something she wants enough to turn on Red John. And neither is anything else you've offered her yet. What you should be doing is getting into her head, her relationship with him, figuring out what her weak points are. Believe me, you are not among them."</p><p>He waved this aside. "Let's not debate interrogation tactics, which are all academic anyway until we get her back."</p><p>"And when we do?" she asked. "Are you going to kiss her again? Sleep with her again? Is that part of your brilliant plan to get her to crack?"</p><p>"I don't want to."</p><p>"That's not a no."</p><p>"I <em>really</em> don't want to, I don't think I'll have to, but if she was going to give up Red John's name for the price of a kiss then yes, I would kiss her."</p><p>She supposed she wouldn't have believed him if he tried to tell her otherwise.</p><p>He leaned back and ran a hand over his face. "Look, do you believe that I don't want her?"</p><p>"Not even physically? She's an attractive woman."</p><p>"How do you think it felt, being with her when I knew exactly who sent her?" he said harshly, hunching forward. "That's the power she has over me, all right? Not the power of desire, the power of making me do things I hate and making me act like I want them." He looked at her, a desperate plea on his face. "Don't think I wanted any of it."</p><p>"If you felt that strongly about it, how could you even…?"</p><p>His eyes became distant. "It was a predictable ploy," he said. "I understood the possibility - in fact I invited it, by leaving women out of my show of self-degradation entirely. I was anticipating a proposition, most likely from someone he'd also been intimate with - if he wanted to create a bond with me, that would seem to him both like a point of connection and a stronger test of my… sincerity. After I met Lorelei, it was obvious what he expected. But it was better than a lot of the alternatives. I didn't have to hurt an innocent, for example. So when she came to me… I pretended she was someone else. I'm good at pretending." He glanced at Lisbon and decided to spare her the obvious question. "I thought of a girl I went out with when I was a teenager - a townie girl, but a tough cookie, name of Lizette Herrera. I pretended that was her, all grown up, and we'd met again by chance."</p><p>"Why her?"</p><p>"There was enough physical similarity for the trick to work. And she was so long ago - I wasn't even remotely betraying her. She was a happy memory I was willing to sacrifice."</p><p>Listening, Lisbon felt they were both split in two - there was the honest Jane and the version of her that wanted to offer him comfort, and the lying Jane and the version of her that wanted to scoff at his bid for sympathy. Caught between them, she could neither reassure nor reject him.</p><p>"How did you feel about it afterward?" she asked instead.</p><p>"I used biofeedback to go to sleep right after, and in the morning she gave me her message from Red John. Then I could think about that instead of her. As soon as I was sure I wasn't being tailed I drove straight back to Sacramento to find you. Seeing you after that felt like - like coming back to life. You can't imagine how happy I was to have you yelling at me again."</p><p>"Like that, do you?" she asked sourly.</p><p>"It meant you weren't through with me," he explained. "It meant I still mattered to you. Sometimes I was afraid that when I got back, you'd just walk away from me without a word."</p><p>"You mean, do to you what you did to me?"</p><p>"I'm sorry," he said.</p><p>"You say that," she told him, "but I don't think it means anything when you would make all the same choices over again if given the chance."</p><p>"I don't know if I would, anymore."</p><p>"Yeah, well, Red John and Lorelei both escaped, so in hindsight I guess it doesn't look so great."</p><p>"That's not the only factor that's changed my thinking."</p><p>She decided she didn't like that topic of conversation anymore. She took a sip of tea, which was not any better lukewarm than it had been hot.</p><p>"So why didn't you tell me that you slept with her?"</p><p>"I don't know, I was ashamed, I didn't want to think about, I didn't want to talk about it, so I just didn't."</p><p>"But you had to know it was going to come up once we had her in custody. You made a conscious decision not to tell me before the interrogation."</p><p>He remained silent.</p><p>"I think you wanted to let her have her weapon," Lisbon told him. "I think you wanted to give her the feeling of a little more of that power over you, even at my expense. You knew it would hurt me."</p><p>"I thought it would disgust you," he said, not looking at her. "And your revulsion for both of us would put the two of us together, against you."</p><p>She swallowed and drew further away from him. "At least this time you're admitting how you used me," she said, voice brittle.</p><p>"I'm sorry," he said again.</p><p>She just shook her head.</p><p>"I was in a bad place, and I made bad decisions, and I hurt you. I know that. I regret it. I do care about your feelings. I love you."</p><p>"None of that makes it all right." She wrapped her arms around herself. "Six months, Jane. You made me suffer for six months because you didn't trust me to go along with your plan or you didn't trust I could do it if I tried. Fine, I get that you had a lousy time too, but you chose that. I didn't. You didn't let me choose. That's what you do when you keep things from someone, you take their choices away. And then when you finally came back you just made everything worse. And now you want to call that love? If it is, it's a pretty ugly version of it."</p><p>He offered no reply.</p><p>"And now you're sorry and you want to make it up to me, but it's just the same cycle as ever. You pull some outrageous stunt, you make me clean up the mess and pay the price for what you did, I get pissed off, you keep trying to appease me until finally I forgive you, and then we do the whole thing over again. It just seems different now because you've never hurt me this much before, but it'll end the same way, and next week or next month you'll have another great idea and we'll be off to the races again. I just hope you maybe for once try to see the consequences of what you do ahead of time. Because there are consequences. And not just for you and me. Sarah's broken up with Rigsby over his fake death, you know."</p><p>"Meh, she's too short for him anyway."</p><p>Her mouth dropped open. "You're such a jerk!"</p><p>"It was a joke! I just meant - they were obviously never going to work out."</p><p>"Yeah, you basically did him a favor, right? He can't see Ben now, Jane. He's separated from his own son. And I don't even blame Sarah! Stan won't pick up my calls anymore, he's still furious he heard about my death on the nightly news."</p><p>"Maybe you should let him punch you in the nose," he suggested. "It made you feel better after you thought you were dying in the bio-research lab."</p><p>She had almost forgotten about that, but now it all came rushing back. "Punching isn't very popular in my family these days," she said tightly. Then she shook her head. "You made me think I was going to die, Jane. Christ, you're something else. I can't believe you did that to me. I can't believe you did it and I didn't even learn my lesson - that I trusted you even a little after that." She sighed. "There's something really wrong with me."</p><p>He tried to lay a hand on her shoulder but she jerked away and rose to her feet. "There's nothing wrong with you," he said.</p><p>"Oh, there are plenty of things wrong with me," she assured him, "and you know it because you know how to take advantage of every one of them." She laughed. "It's like you said in your letter, right? I should have known better. It's my fault for letting you do it."</p><p>"Teresa -" he began.</p><p>"I think I need to leave now," she said, and grabbed her bag off the floor.</p><hr/><p>Instead of getting into her car, Lisbon set out on foot, trying to walk off some of the tumult of emotions that pummeled her from every side: frustrated resentment, bitter anger, wounded yearning, pity and tenderness, all wrapped in a dreadful buzzing uncertainty. It was all too much, but she had no way to escape or discharge the tension of it, so instead she just went back to him, again and again, wandering deeper into his labyrinth.</p><p>It was a hot afternoon, and the sidewalks offered no shade. There was just concrete and traffic noise and glare, and after a few blocks she turned around again.</p><p>In the hotel parking lot, Jane was sitting on the curb next to her bumper. He looked up at her approach, his face drawn and wretched. "Maybe I should just go away," he said. "Would it be better for you if you never had to see me again?"</p><p>She badly wanted to kick him. "I'm upset that you ditched me for half a year, so your solution is to leave forever? What's the matter with you? How would that fix anything?"</p><p>"I'm sick of making you miserable," he said, "but I can't seem to do anything else. I've been trying my best to make things better but nothing seems to help. My need to be near you doesn't outweigh your happiness. I don't know what else to do."</p><p>"Wow, you've spent all week not being an asshole, that must be exhausting. No wonder you're ready to throw in the towel." She crossed her arms. "I don't want you to disappear again, you idiot. I want you to actually treat me like your partner. I want you to freely share information with me and include me when you're making plans and have my back when I need you."</p><p>"I can do that," he promised. "I will do that."</p><p>"Sure you will."</p><p>"I've been honest with you this week. I have."</p><p>"If you say so." She dug her keys out of her purse. "Goodbye Jane. I expect to see you Monday morning. And just so we're clear, if you skip town again I'm putting an APB out on you."</p><p>He grinned like she'd just awarded him a prize, and waved her off cheerfully as she drove away, wondering if she'd just been had.</p><hr/><p>Lisbon was already in bed reading that night when her phone rang.</p><p>"What is it, Jane?"</p><p>"I've been thinking about some of our recent conversations, and I want to clarify something." His voice was sleepy and warm.</p><p>"Oh?"</p><p>"You've very reasonably tried to ask me about my intentions toward you, and I haven't known what to tell you. But I want you to understand that isn't because I'm in any doubt about my feelings or desires. It's because I'm not free to act on them. I won't put you in any more danger."</p><p>"That's a very convenient excuse."</p><p>"You think Red John is <em>convenient</em> for me?" he demanded. "I would cut off my own leg to be done with this. You have no idea how much I wish I could just offer myself to you, body and soul. But I cannot be responsible for the death of another woman I love."</p><p>"You're not responsible for anything that monster has done or will do," she snapped.</p><p>"But you can't deny that he reacts to me. He took Kristina Frye after I went on a single date with her!" His voice was high with tension. "And it wasn't even a good one!"</p><p>"Kristina went on TV and -"</p><p>"I can't risk it," he said. "Not with you."</p><p>She put her hand over her eyes. "Then why are we even talking about it? What's the point of any of this?"</p><p>"Because I can't deny my feelings for you anymore, even if I can't act on them. I'm sick of pretending I don't want to buy out a whole florist shop for you and take you out for a night on the town and tell you -"</p><p>"Stop it!"</p><p>"But-"</p><p>"I don't want to hear it," she said. "You're peddling fantasies. A fantasy is just a lie you wish was true. It's not fair to me. What do you want - you want me to say I'll put my life on hold and wait for you based on nothing but hot air? You want me to promise I'll go to dinner with you two weeks from never, when Red John's dead and you're in jail?"</p><p>"I told you I don't intend to go to prison," he said. "My priorities have changed."</p><p>"Yeah, tell me that again at our next Red John crime scene, maybe I'll buy it then."</p><p>"I understand your skepticism, but I'm telling you the truth."</p><p>"Oh, that's a good one," she said. "Yesterday you swore never to leave me again, today you were all ready to pack your bags. Yesterday you said I could have anything I wanted from you, today it turns out that offer has some pretty goddamn giant caveats attached. Sometimes I wonder if there's even any truth inside you to tell, or if it's lies all the way down."</p><p>There was a pause. "I'm not like you," he said eventually, voice low and rough. "I'm not - solid the way you are, a rock the river of the world can flow around without shifting. I'm more like the water - I take the shape given to me by the situation I'm in. But water is still itself, it has properties, it's not going to turn into oil or liquid nitrogen or mercury if you pour it from a cup into a bowl. And one of my fundamental properties is that I love you. That doesn't ever change, even if it doesn't look quite the same from day to day. I want so much to give you everything you wish for. I want to make you happy. But I want to keep you safe even more than that."</p><p>She sighed. "I'm not sure there's such a thing as safe," she said. "And I don't think I like where that leaves me. I'm not the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, Jane. I'm not the princess in the tower you get to kiss after slaying the dragon. I'm right there next to you on the battlefield, running the same risks you are. I've been there all along."</p><p>"I don't think you're a trophy, Teresa. Of course I don't. I'm just - monumentally terrified of losing you, yet that's exactly where every path in front of me seems to lead, one way or another."</p><p>"Then blaze a new path," she told him, and hung up.</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0007"><h2>7. Chapter 7</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  <strong>Day 7:</strong>
</p><p>An hour after Lisbon came home from attending mass, feeling soothed by the familiar rituals and by having gone a full two hours without thinking about Patrick Jane, there came a knock at her apartment door.</p><p>Maybe it was a neighbor who wanted to borrow a cup of sugar, she told herself. Maybe it was a political canvasser who wanted her to sign a petition. Maybe it was a serial killer who wanted to paint the wall with her blood.</p><p>"Can I come in?" Jane called, spoiling all her hopes.</p><p>"It's Sunday," she replied. "Do I not get even one day off from you?"</p><p>"This will only take a minute. I won't even sit down. But I need you to let me in."</p><p>Surely he could have taken a minute of her time during the work week when she was paid to put up with him, she told herself. It was a mistake to let him win these small battles and let him get her into the habit of indulging him, she told herself.</p><p>"<em>One</em> minute," she said, and opened the door.</p><p>Jane glanced around curiously as he entered her apartment, but he refocused on her when she coughed expectantly.</p><p>He pulled something from his jacket and held it out to her. "I want you to read this."</p><p>It was a very familiar leather-bound journal. Stunned, she accepted it and flipped through the pages just to be sure. "This is your Red John notebook." She would have been significantly less surprised if he'd handed her a live penguin.</p><p>"You said you wanted me to share information with you," he said. "This is me doing that." He shrugged. "Parts of it are a bit cryptic. You can ask me about things you don't understand. But only when we're truly alone. You can't keep it and you can't copy anything out of it," he warned her.</p><p>She nodded. "I'll take good care of it," she promised, holding it against her chest. Then a thought hit her. "How do I know this is your actual journal and not a decoy version with just enough misinformation to throw anyone who gets a hold it off your real track?"</p><p>He smiled. "Because that one's hidden in the CBI attic."</p><p>"And how do I know which is which?"</p><p>He seemed unperturbed by her lack of trust. "I can prove it. We can go there now and you can compare the two."</p><p>"Fine."</p><hr/><p>An hour later, she had to admit she was convinced. The journal from the attic was virtually identical to the one he'd given her, from the colors of ink on each page to the wear marks on the cover, but certain key pieces of information were missing or different - and several of them were details from cases she'd investigated with him, so she could tell which was the true version.</p><p>"Unless you've got a third copy hidden away," she noted.</p><p>"Meh, that would have been too much work."</p><p>She raised her eyebrows at this but held her peace. She'd save any further skepticism for after she'd had a chance to read the entire notebook and evaluate its contents.</p><p>"Do you need to get home right away?" he asked.</p><p>She gave him a wary glance. She would much rather hole herself up with her new treasure and dig right into it than spend another hour painfully dissecting her history with Jane, but his offering had bought him a significant amount of leeway.</p><p>"Why?"</p><p>"We should go for ice cream," he said, smiling winningly, as if she was not holding the dearly guarded secrets of his life's work in her hands.</p><p>"We should?"</p><p>"It'll be fun!"</p><p>"It will?" she said doubtfully, trying and failing to recall the last instance when the two of them had experienced anything resembling fun together.</p><p>"I promise," he said. "Come on, I'll buy you a sundae. It's a hot day. I will be delightful company."</p><p>"No tricks?"</p><p>"Nary a trick anywhere to be found," he promised.</p><p>"I don't want a sundae."</p><p>He cocked his head to the side. "Ah. Too heavy for this time of the day. A milkshake, then?"</p><p>She considered his proposition. Their conversation last night had started the wheels turning in her mind, and she did need more evidence to find out if she was on the right track. "Fine, one milkshake, delightful company, and no tricks or I get my money back."</p><hr/><p>Twenty-five minutes later, she was forced to admit he had kept his word. They were seated on a shady patio, she was most of the way done with a milkshake that had real honest-to-god raspberries blended into it, and Jane had been nothing but entertaining and personable. He'd wheedled a few childhood stories out of her and had just concluded an anecdote about a former client who'd been very determined to get more than just her palm read that left her in stitches.</p><p>She couldn't figure it out. She'd expected - if not a trick - at least an attempt at some kind of persuasion, but if he was up to something, it was too subtle for her to grasp.</p><p>"Why are we doing this?" she finally asked him when she was done laughing. "Why right now?"</p><p>His expression sobered. He paused for a moment, perhaps considering a deflection, but then seemed to steel himself, the tension that had been lurking beneath his sunny demeanor rising to the surface. "You're about to dive into… some of the less appealing aspects of my personality," he said. "Before you do that, I just… wanted to remind you that's not all of me. I'm still a person, too." He looked into her eyes. "And that's largely thanks to you. I don't like to think of where or who I'd be without you." At her skeptical face, he continued, "Remember what I was like when we met? Do you really think I'd have gotten better left to my own devices? And who else could there possibly have been, if not you?"</p><p>"You think I've influenced you?" she asked, as casually as she could.</p><p>"Of course!" He looked surprised that she had asked. "Knowing you changed my whole life. How could you not have changed me?" His expression took on a shade of uncertainty. "Do I not seem different than I was when you first knew me?"</p><p>"I would have said yes a year ago."</p><p>He caught her eye again. "And now?"</p><p>She found she didn't have an answer for him. His gaze was warm and open, and he had just given her exactly what she'd asked for. The way he looked at her wasn't new, but it hadn't been there all along. The first years they'd worked together, there had been shutters behind his face that never opened, not when he smiled or laughed or basked in the sun, not when he won a bet or unmasked a murderer or in the few rare moments when he spoke of his family. Some of his military-grade shielding was due to grief, some to a lifetime spent as a social predator, some to the parents he never mentioned at all. She couldn't say when the distance between them had begun to shrink, when she had first glanced at him and thought, with a flash of visceral recognition, <em>there you are.</em> She had supposed that being on the team, that doing work that contributed something - even if he did it to pursue a personal agenda - had been good for him. But then he walked away from all of it and became that other person again.</p><p>She thought maybe she was finally starting to understand him, to see what held him together and tore him apart. But she wasn't sure yet.</p><p>"Ah," he said, as if she'd spoken, and maybe from his point of view she had. If so, she wished he'd let her in on whatever he'd read off her face. But instead he just said, "I believe you haven't received your full portion of delightful company yet," and proceeded to cold read the couple sitting two tables over from them, who were apparently having a truly scandalous affair.</p><hr/><p>The first time through, Lisbon read the journal cover to cover, just taking it in. The first sections were highly organized, including analysis of Red John's criminal history broken down by chronology, geography, victimology, and so on. She got the sense this part had been copied out from an earlier iteration of the notebook. After that came topics related to Red John's psychology and motivations - including, interestingly, ideas about why he may have chosen Jane specifically as his declared antagonist (the most depressing of these was "because he is sure I will lose"). Next were profiles of his known associates and as-yet-unidentified minions - their backgrounds, activities, psychopathology, the exact words they had spoken. Then came brainstorming - unconnected, unsubstantiated ideas about every aspect of the case, jotted down in a variety of inks over time. The final section was the most recent - it contained notes on the latest Red John murders as well as Vegas and Lorelei and the conversation in the limo. Here there was no order, just thoughts, sentences, quotes, single words, occasionally a fragment that seemed to have nothing to do with the case at all. The whole thing was a record of a mind in conversation with itself - even the first, most factual sections featured marginalia that were clearly added later, with a different pen, and on every page there were places where a word had been crossed out and replaced with an apparently more helpful or accurate synonym.</p><p>On the second read-through, she flipped back and forth, trying to follow his thinking, to decode the abbreviations and odd notation he'd used to streamline his observations, to see how the different sections related to each other.</p><p>On the third pass, she dug out a pencil and began marking it up herself. She hesitated before inscribing her first comment - inserting herself into this private domain was presumptuous, perhaps even unwelcome. But she didn't just want to peek through the curtains of his obsession and let them drop back down again. She wanted to be an equal partner in his quest. So she set her pencil to the page, lightly at first but with increasing confidence as she went on, circling things to discuss with him, jotting question marks where she couldn't discern his meaning, adding her own words to dispute or elaborate on what he had written.</p><p>It was a remarkable document, a concise, incisive summation of an investigation that, in the voluminous, rigid format of law enforcement records took up over a dozen file boxes worth of paper. Stripped in this way to the essentials, it was much easier to identify repeating themes in the case, commonalities that had been lost in the sea of uninformative details required by CBI reporting.</p><p>There were, of course, a few surprises, but in terms of concrete leads, Jane had held less back than she'd expected. Maybe she was better at spotting his dishonesty than she'd thought. Or maybe there was another layer of secrecy beyond this one, things he had never committed to paper, just in case.</p><p>Still, sharing the journal with her was an unprecedented display of trust. He could not take it back later, like a hasty declaration of love.</p><p>She considered what he'd said earlier - that he was afraid her opinion of him might change for the worse. She didn't think it had, though. There were disturbing parts - the section entitled "What He Wants Them to Feel" that chronicled in harrowing detail what the experience of a Red John murder might be like from the victim's point of view, made more heartbreaking by the certainty that this was him envisioning the terror and agony of his wife and daughter's final moments. The diagram of that familiar cutting pattern applied to a masked male figure, with ideas noted about the potential order of the incisions, as well as possible additions that would maximize pain, disfigurement, or the speed with which the victim was permanently incapacitated.</p><p>But none of it fell outside the bounds of what she had already believed about him. It wasn't the diary of a lunatic or a sadist. There was nothing the slightest bit admiring in his assessment of Red John and his brutal work.</p><p>It was after midnight when she reluctantly lay the journal down for the night. She needed to unwind if she was going to get any sleep. She cracked open a beer and put on a Dizzy Gillespie CD. Sitting on the couch with her feet up and her head tilted back against the cushions, she closed her eyes and let her mind wander.</p><p>It returned, yet again, to something Jane had said the night before. He had compared himself to water, taking the shape of the space that held him. There was something very true about this, she thought. In the past, she'd often seen him as putting himself above others, using his observational powers to manipulate and control those around him, while he himself remained aloof, untouched by the swirling passions he so easily bent toward his aims. Yet in another way, this put him in a perpetual state of reactivity, sensitized to the smallest nuance of social input and constantly adjusting himself according to it. He was, in fact, unusually vulnerable to everyone else, exactly because he received so much more information from each interaction than an ordinary person.</p><p>She thought of the one trip she'd ever made outside of North America - a visit to Vietnam for the wedding of one of her best friends from college, made possible by a lucky airfare sale and a willingness to spend two consecutive nights on airport floors between flights. She had spent ten days unable to read almost anything, to even recognize a single character written on a menu or storefront. When she got home, the visual barrage of English signage had overwhelmed her - there were words on everything, everywhere she looked, on t-shirts, on buildings, on billboards, on banners hanging from the street lights downtown, and there was no way not to decode it. She could not block the words out - had never been able to, of course, but the demands literacy made on her attention had been so ubiquitous as to be invisible until she visited a place where she could not read.</p><p>Being Patrick Jane, she thought, was like having fluency in another language, one written all over everyone he ever met, that he could not unsee or ignore. It must be exhausting, and it must require constant effort to keep hold of himself amid it all, to know what was within him and what was coming from without.</p><p>No wonder he got lost sometimes. Playing so many parts, pulled in so many directions, there must be very little of him that felt constant and real. He seemed so vibrantly and utterly himself to her, but she suspected that when he looked within, he sometimes saw little but shadows and fog. It must have been painful for him, this past week, to face accusations of exactly that from her, the person he revealed himself to more than any other.</p><p>She didn't regret what she'd done though. She'd meant every single thing she said, and if there was to be any hope for him, or for them, he had to understand the consequences of going too far. He had to truly know there were limits to what she could tolerate.</p><p>But she had to understand his limits, too. He would never be straightforward or honest in the conventional sense. If she tried to force him into a single form, to change his flowing water into solid ice, she would be destroying something essential in him.</p><p>And yet there needed to be a piece of him that remained untouched by his alterations, some unwavering core that could keep him from dissipating completely. Water could not stop itself from following the path of least resistance, no matter where it led or who had carved it out. But human beings had to have boundaries to maintain a sense of self. He claimed his devotion to her was constant, but even if he did love her, it wasn't enough. Love without trust, without partnership, obviously couldn't anchor him.</p><p>But she was beginning to believe he might be capable of change. Sharing his journal with her - that would have been anathema to the secretive, paranoid Jane she knew. It was, in fact, probably the single most significant gift and concession it was in his power to give her. As evidence, it was, if not irrefutable, at least very convincing.</p><p>And, she decided, it ought to be rewarded.</p><p>He picked up his phone halfway through the first ring. "Hi." He sounded edgy.</p><p>His nervousness transmitted itself to her, and she found herself unsure how to begin. "Sorry to call so late."</p><p>"It's fine. I wasn't sleeping."</p><p>The silence drew out a beat too long. "I just -" she didn't know why this was so hard to say. "I wanted to thank you."</p><p>"You did?"</p><p>"It means a lot," she said. "That you would trust me with this."</p><p>"I'm glad."</p><p>"And - nothing I read changed anything for me. I mean, not in a bad way. I don't know exactly what you were worried about, but I don't think you needed to be."</p><p>"That's good to hear." He sounded more relaxed.</p><p>"Why did you show it to me?"</p><p>He drew a breath. "You know why," he said. "To prove I meant what I said to you. And because you were right, I haven't treated you like my partner, and - well, that hasn't worked out so wonderfully. Not for us personally and, as for the rest - we haven't caught him yet, have we? My way hasn't worked, your way hasn't worked - it seemed worth trying something different. And as ungrateful as I know I often seem, I'm not oblivious to what I owe you. You've put yourself on the line for me, you let me shoot you - it seemed churlish not to offer you anything in return."</p><p>She was pleased with the answer. "But there were reasons you kept it to yourself up until now. Do they not matter anymore?"</p><p>"There were really two reasons. First, that I didn't want you to catch him before I did - that I don't care as much about anymore. Second, that the less you knew, the safer I thought you'd be. But he's brought you into his game now. I don't think what I've shared with you will increase the danger you're in. I think the only way to protect you is to stop him entirely."</p><p>This was what she'd expected. "All right," she said. "Look, it's late. I don't need to keep you. But… Thanks. I -" it seemed too trite and silly to say that what he'd given her, today, was hope. "I don't take this lightly. Thank you."</p><p>"Really?" he asked, sounding amused. "That's all?"</p><p>"What else were you expecting, Jane?"</p><p>"I'm just amazed," he said happily, "that we've had a whole conversation without you accusing me of lying to you or advancing a nefarious agenda. This is great progress!"</p><p>"Well, it was a short conversation."</p><p>"I'll take it!" he told her. "Good night, I love you!" He hung up before she could respond.</p><p>She found herself laughing as she put her phone down. It felt good to not, for once, be at odds with him.</p><p>But it was also a warning sign. It meant the window of opportunity was closing. Once things went back to normal - even a somewhat different normal than before - it would be too late to further change his course. He was a man of superlative stubbornness, and while he was exhibiting some flexibility now, in the midst of crisis, as soon as he felt in control of the situation again, her leverage would be vastly reduced.</p><p>There would be no further thawing, she resolved, until she had made her move. But first, she needed a little more evidence to confirm her suspicions. It was time to begin the next phase of her investigation.</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0008"><h2>8. Chapter 8</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  <strong>Day 8:</strong>
</p><p>A hand reached out and grabbed the closing doors of the CBI elevator as Lisbon walked up to them on Monday morning.</p><p>"Thanks, Yang," she said as soon as saw who'd done her the good turn. He was from Missing Persons, on the same floor as the SCU, so she didn't even have to press the button. "Hey, nice job on the Gutierrez case," she added. "That took a lotta guts."</p><p>"Just part of the job," he said modestly. Yang didn't puff himself up like a lot of agents, even after running into a burning building to save a child's life. She respected that.</p><p>It occurred to her that this was a golden opportunity. Yang was a decent guy, single, good looking, and he'd done a bit of cautious flirting with her a few months back. At that point, near the nadir of her Jane-disappearance-induced insomnia and gloom, she'd been in no mood for dating and had maintained her distance.</p><p>"That's not how I heard it," she told him, smiling and brushing her hair back over her shoulder. The elevator dinged their arrival and they stepped out. "Man, I need a coffee. You?"</p><p>"Always," he said, and accompanied her toward the kitchen.</p><hr/><p>"You're looking very pleased with yourself," Jane observed as he followed her into her office ten minutes later.</p><p>"Mmhmm," she agreed, putting down her bag and shrugging off her jacket.</p><p>"You and Yang seemed quite friendly back there."</p><p>She'd thought she'd caught him peeking into the kitchen.</p><p>"He's a good guy." She sat down and powered up her computer.</p><p>"He asked you out, didn't he?"</p><p>She looked up at him and raised her eyebrows, still smiling.</p><p>"You… didn't say no."</p><p>"Why should I?"</p><p>Jane dropped heavily into the chair by her desk. "But…"</p><p>"You're not my boyfriend," she said. "You don't even want to date me -"</p><p>"It's not about <em>want</em>," he interrupted, "it's about -"</p><p>"I'm not a toy you can put on the shelf and store away for later when you're ready to play with me," she snapped. "You can't put dibs on a person."</p><p>Jane visibly struggled with something before speaking. "I understand that my feelings are not a significant factor to you at the moment," he said carefully, "and that's all right, I know that you have no obligations to me, but aren't things already complicated enough without involving a third party just because you're angry at me?"</p><p>"Right," she said scathingly, leaning back in her chair, "what possible reason could I have for being interested in a smart, attractive, courageous man, other than wanting to hurt you?"</p><p>"You may wish you didn't," he said, "but we both know you have feelings for me, so it's a bit disingenuous to pretend that your dating life has nothing to do with me, isn't it?"</p><p>"Maybe I just want a break from you, Jane. Maybe I want to go out and have fun and feel good just once, for a change. What's so wrong with that?"</p><p>"It might start simple, but it never stays that way," he argued. "What happens two months from now when you've gotten over being angry at me and your new boyfriend wants to know why you and I keep staring at each other the way we do?"</p><p>"I do not <em>stare</em> at you," she said sharply, "and Kevin asked me out to dinner, not to marry him."</p><p>"That's how it always starts though, isn't it? One date and then two and three, then you're texting all the time and planning a weekend away somewhere and -"</p><p>"Wow, it's really sweet of you to want to spare me all that misery," she said, privately thinking that sometimes it didn't start that way at all, sometimes it started with a disheveled widower provoking your volatile coworker to punch him in the face and then just never, ever leaving - until one day, eight years later, he did. "Cut the sheep dip, don't pretend you're trying to do me a favor here. At least own up to the fact that we're having this conversation because <em>you</em> don't want me going out with him."</p><p>He slumped down in his chair. "You're right," he admitted. "I'm just being selfish. You should go out with Yang. Let him make you happy. It's certainly more than I can give you. You deserve that. You deserve - everything."</p><p>Lisbon's mouth turned down. She couldn't exactly say she was surprised that self-loathing Jane was making an appearance, though she did wonder if his apparent defeat was genuine or an attempt at making himself pathetic enough to get his way through sympathy. In the end, it didn't really matter. She'd seen enough.</p><p>"I didn't say yes," she confessed. "I told him things were crazy for me right now but he could ask me again some other time."</p><p>When Jane glanced up at her, there was a bit of hope in his eyes, but less triumph than she had expected.</p><p>He'd just opened his mouth to reply when there was a knock at her door.</p><p>Rigsby stuck his head in at her word. "We caught one, Boss."</p><hr/><p>"Our killer is a cop," Jane announced six hours later, as the team gathered to discuss their progress. They had two bodies so far, both shot three times in the torso, one dumped in the river, another decapitated postmortem and left at a construction site. "Or a former cop. One who worked organized crime. These were meant to look like gang hits, but he can't hide his training." He tapped his chin. "He'll have a record of excessive force, including questionable shootings." He looked toward Van Pelt. "Can you get us a list from the database?"</p><p>She looked uncomfortable. "What database?"</p><p>He gestured impatiently toward her computer. "I don't know, whatever you call the database where you keep tabs on who shoots who."</p><p>She shot a pleading look at Lisbon.</p><p>"There isn't a database like that, Jane," Lisbon told him.</p><p>He looked appalled. "What? You mean Grace can look up the calls a suspect made to his mother three years ago, or what video games he charged to his credit card, but you people don't keep track of it when you <em>kill someone</em>?"</p><p>She winced. "I mean, there are incident records and stats that individual police departments keep, you've seen what we do here after one of us fires a weapon, but it's not aggregated or searchable in the way you mean."</p><p>"Unbelievable," he muttered. "Well, we'll start local. You can check CBI records and get someone to look into the SacPD for us, can't you?"</p><p>"We can do that," she promised.</p><p>"I can see if anyone in either of the vics' families was in law enforcement," Van Pelt offered.</p><p>"That'll be a start," he said. Then he lay down on his couch and pointedly shut his eyes.</p><hr/><p>They hit a wall in the investigation a few hours later, and Lisbon let the team go for the night. Jane lingered, following her into her office when she jerked her head in invitation. She closed the blinds, then pulled his journal out from its hiding place in her locked drawer.</p><p>She handed it back to him. "We have a lot to talk about," she said.</p><p>They ended up back at Jane's hotel again. This time, she accepted the glass of wine he offered her without hesitation, and sat next to him on the couch, a bare inch of space between them, so they could page through the journal together.</p><p>He offered no comment on her audacity in having marked up his notes. He patiently answered her questions, explaining the more obscure portions to her satisfaction.</p><p>She hesitated over the page describing Red John's poetry recitation, brushing Jane's hand away when he moved to turn the page, his skin warm and electric where it touched hers.</p><p>He looked up at her. "Is this the part where you yell at me for having lied to you back then?"</p><p>"No," she said absently, still staring down at the words. "It's just - this reminds me of something, but I can't think what."</p><p>"What aspect of it?" he asked, gaze suddenly sharp.</p><p>"William Blake. Someone else said something about him, or quoted a poem… I don't remember who, or when."</p><p>He opened his mouth and shut it again.</p><p>She glanced at him and narrowed her eyes. "You're thinking about offering to hypnotize me but you think I'll get mad."</p><p>He shrugged.</p><p>"Just - let's see if it comes back to me," she said. "Maybe I'll remember it on my own."</p><p>"It could be really important."</p><p>"You think I'm not aware of that? You're the one who didn't tell me about this until we were so deep in the weeds of the case that I couldn't think about anything else. If I'd known about it from the start, I would have made the connection right away."</p><p>He subsided, leaning back against the couch, and she turned the page.</p><p>Another glass of wine later, they were going over the section about Red John's associates.</p><p>"I never quite put together just how many of them were in or adjacent to law enforcement," she mused. Anthony Gupta, the bomb maker, had turned out to have a stint in the military, followed by nine months in the Fresno PD, after which he'd suddenly quit and bought the gas station. It wasn't clear where the funds had come from. Ron Deutsch, the mall security guard who had tampered with the evidence when Jane killed Timothy Carter, had washed out of police training years earlier.</p><p>"Not Lorelei," he pointed out.</p><p>"That we know of - we really ought to dig into her background, see if there are commonalities with any of his other accomplices that might indicate how or where he met her." She took a drink. "I'll get Van Pelt on it as soon as we're done with this case. Hmm, Timothy Carter wasn't law enforcement either."</p><p>"That we know of," Jane mimicked her. "We never really got deeper than his alias. We have no idea who he actually was."</p><p>"And Todd Johnson wasn't a cop, but he worked with them as an EMT, and he did kill them, probably on Red John's orders."</p><p>"Where are you going with this?" he asked.</p><p>She flipped to the page where he'd listed a dozen possible professions Red John might be in and tapped where he'd written <em>police officer, </em>below hedge fund manager, big game hunter, surgeon, and independently wealthy<em>.</em> "For the most part, the people cops know and spend time with are other cops. We're pretty insular. For him to have that many connections… makes sense for him to be one of us."</p><p>"He could be peripheral," Jane said. "Prosecutor, forensics tech, consultant, that kind of thing."</p><p>"Maybe. But he's probably someone his accomplices identify with, look up to, view as an authority in some way. I'm not sure a lab rat or a guy with a desk job fits the bill." She frowned at him. "And if he's in California law enforcement…"</p><p>"I know," Jane said. "There's a decent chance we've met him at some point over the years. Worked a case with him. He'd love that - standing right next to me, watching me do my thing, with me having no idea at all who he truly was. It would have been a real treat."</p><p>"Jane," she said, "if he wanted it that much, maybe he made it happen. We should look up exactly who requested our involvement in every case we've worked since you joined the team."</p><p>"That's a good idea," he said. "But don't forget it could be someone inside the CBI as well. Someone we see every day. It would explain his access to our systems, and how he was able to turn Rebecca. Or someone in a federal agency we've brushed up against."</p><p>She drained the last of her wine and sat back as he emptied the bottle into their glasses. She picked up the journal and flipped through the pages again, finding her next question mark, ready to dig back in.</p><hr/><p>The first time she woke up, the light was dim, and someone was lifting her. It should have been alarming, but although disoriented, she was unafraid, her arms reaching up to loop around a neck through some long-dormant instinct left over from early childhood.</p><p>"You fell asleep," Jane murmured soothingly, "and you drank too much to drive. You'll be more comfortable on the bed."</p><p>Her eyelids were too heavy to keep open. There was a sensation of motion, and then the warmth of his body was replaced by the coolness of sheets. A blanket came down over her, and a gentle hand brushed the hair back from her face, and then there was darkness.</p><hr/><p>The second time she woke up, it was to a sound of distress. Lisbon sat up and blinked in the darkness. The hotel room was faintly illuminated by the green glow of the alarm clock and the light from the parking lot trickling in around the curtains, and she could see Jane's form sprawled out along the couch. It shifted suddenly, and the noise came again, somewhere between a whimper and a moan.</p><p>Without thinking, she got out of bed and padded across the floor to him, perching on the edge of the couch, but she hesitated before touching him. This would not be the first time she'd woken him from a nightmare, but it would the first time she had done so in the black of the night, without the excuse that she was rousing him to make him do a bit of work.</p><p>He twitched again, shoving his face further into his pillow, and she steadied herself and put her hand on his shoulder, shaking him gently and then a little harder. "Wake up, Jane. It's okay, just wake up."</p><p>He jerked into alertness, staring up at her first with blank panic and then confusion. "Lisbon?"</p><p>"Yeah, I'm here," she said. "Are you all right?"</p><p>"Sure," he said unconvincingly, and wiped his hand across his face. "What time is it?"</p><p>"I don't know. Early."</p><p>"Sorry I disturbed you. You should get some more rest."</p><p>"It's okay." She paused. "You want to talk about it?"</p><p>He shook his head.</p><p>"You going to sleep anymore?"</p><p>A shrug.</p><p>His body was hot against her hip, and for a moment she wanted to climb into that warmth, to give him the hug he so obviously needed, to coax him back to sleep with the comfort of her touch. But that wasn't what they did, nor was it a line she was ready to cross.</p><p>She gave him a gentle squeeze with the hand she still had on his shoulder and then let go. She got up and went back to bed. They didn't speak, but the silence felt different with both of them knowing the other was awake.</p><p>Lisbon found herself wrestling, yet again, with what exactly she was to him. It stood to reason that a man like Jane would seek - would need - a vessel to protect his liquid heart, a person who could remind him who he was when he poured too much of himself out, who could serve as a beacon if he lost his way. Angela, she understood, had filled this role for him for most of his adult life. And yet in a sense she had not succeeded, or he had not given himself to her fully enough to let her.</p><p>Then he had lost his wife, and himself along with her, and he'd eventually latched onto Lisbon instead. As he'd said over ice cream - who else had there been? Sophie Miller perhaps, but the good doctor had been too cold to draw him all the way in.</p><p>But then she had come along, and tried to take care of him in a limited sort of fashion, and he had responded to that, had begun to seek her out, to orbit around her in his cagey, teasing way. It made sense, she thought, that when he realized how much he'd come to depend on her, he might confuse what he felt for her for with what he'd felt for his wife. He might call it love, regardless of what he actually wanted from her. He might be jealous of competition for her attention, not because of passion for her but because he thought a serious boyfriend might occupy too much of her time and emotional focus.</p><p>That might even be a valid concern, she had to admit - Jane did soak up an awful lot of her energy, and balancing him and a romance would be logistically complex. Yet in another sense, it might make everything easier. If he was just her partner, just her consultant, and her personal life was roped off in a socially recognized way, it would all be so much more manageable. She felt a pang of regret as she thought of Kevin Yang, who really was a good match for her, and who would almost certainly never disappear for months on end to play games with a serial killer.</p><p>But Jane, damn him, had been right. It wouldn't have been fair to Yang. Until they finished untangling the nature of their relationship, it might actually not be fair to Jane either, and though she resented his attempts to stake an ever-greater claim on her, she found she'd lost her stomach for deliberately hurting him.</p><p>Besides, very soon she was going to ask him to trust her in a way he had never trusted anyone before, and it would be unreasonable to do that while positioning someone else between them as a human shield.</p><p>She would have to go to him honestly, with her hands open. Even if it terrified her.</p><p>She opened her eyes and thought she could see him looking back at her from the couch. She wondered what occupied his mind in these small, dark hours. She wondered if he would tell her if she asked.</p><p>She didn't.</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0009"><h2>9. Chapter 9</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  <strong>Day 9:</strong>
</p><p>A bullet ricocheted off the brick wall just around the corner from where Lisbon was taking cover. Their suspect was trapped in his own back yard, but after being notified of his impending arrest he'd taken refuge in a speedboat stored on a trailer, and he did not seem inclined to surrender quietly.</p><p>She waited a beat, then leaned out and squeezed off a shot. The movement in the hedges at the back property line told her Cho and Rigsby were almost in position to cut off his retreat. Van Pelt was on the opposite side of the house, preventing escape in that direction, and Jane, God willing, was back in the SUV where he'd been instructed to wait until someone came to get him. Backup was five minutes away.</p><p>Her heart was hammering, but she felt she had a handle on the situation. Their perp was in fact an ex-cop who'd decided to feather his bank account by killing for hire, and that meant she knew his playbook, because they'd all had the same training.</p><p>As she heard him exchange shots with Van Pelt, a brief war waged within her. Protocol demanded that she wait for reinforcements unless the perp was escaping or likely to actually kill someone, but if she didn't personally engage with him, she'd lose the chance to test an important theory. But that wasn't worth putting the rest of the team in any additional danger.</p><p>She'd just made up her mind to stay put and follow the plan when she heard a child's voice from the next yard over.</p><p>"I heard fireworks - come look, Amita!"</p><p>She peeked around the corner and saw a hibiscus bush rustling on the other side of a chain link fence that was going to do absolutely nothing to stop a bullet.</p><p>The suspect fired another shot at her, then changed his aim, having noticed the same movement she had. She knew she couldn't risk him deciding to use the kids as hostages or shooting at them to create a distraction or because he'd mistaken them for more cops. She steadied her arm, took a deep breath, and charged straight at him, shouting instructions at the team.</p><p>His gun came up, aimed squarely at her, and as she fired back at him she prayed she hadn't miscalculated, that he would stick to his MO, that -</p><p>Her shot went wide. His hit her squarely in the chest like a lead pipe, and the ground rushed up to meet her.</p><p>The next thing she knew, she was trying and failing to breathe, her airless lungs refusing to cooperate, while Rigsby yelled instructions at the perp and Van Pelt shouted into her radio, calling for an ambulance.</p><p>Next came the sound of handcuffs, then flying footfalls from the street, and Jane was screaming her name.</p><p>Lisbon kept perfectly still, her eyes closed, as her heart thundered and Jane dropped to his knees beside her.</p><p>She waited one second, and then two, and then opened her eyes, looking up into the taut, ashen face of a man seeing his worst nightmare play out in front of him.</p><p>Her chest heaved as she finally managed to suck in a breath, and then another, the movement igniting the pain radiating from her sternum. Still unable to speak, she tore the front of her CBI parka open so he could see the bullet embedded in her Kevlar vest.</p><p>Apparently beyond words himself, he seized her shoulders and held her against him, his breathing ragged and desperate. She managed to raise one arm to make a vague gesture toward returning his embrace, then dropped it again as Van Pelt rushed up, asking about her condition.</p><p>She reassured them as best she could, but made no objection when the EMTs eventually insisted on bringing her to the hospital for chest scans, Jane following the ambulance while Rigsby and Van Pelt took the killer in for booking and Cho stayed behind with the backup squad to process the scene.</p><p>She found Jane silent and unnaturally still in her ER cubicle when the techs wheeled her back from the imaging suite, and she felt a pang of guilt for having deliberately prolonged his terror earlier, even if it had been for a reason that should ultimately benefit both of them. She had needed to understand him, and she couldn't fully trust his words. But she believed what his face had told her when he'd thought she might be dead.</p><p>Well, she was done being cruel to him now. She held out a hand and he pushed himself up out of his chair to come to her, pasting a smile onto his face that failed to reach his eyes.</p><p>"How are you feeling?" he asked.</p><p>"Not so bad as long as I don't move," she said. She felt like she'd taken a steel frying pan to the chest, but it didn't hurt to breathe, so she thought probably nothing was broken. "The doc's going to come talk to me after looking at the scans, then I should be good to go."</p><p>"That's good," he said, but he didn't sound relieved. His fingers were clutching hers too tightly, and she flexed her hand until he noticed and loosened his grip.</p><p>"Hey, what's wrong?" she asked.</p><p>He shrugged, but the gesture turned into a shudder that ran through his whole body. "What if the vest failed? What if he aimed for your head? I thought you were - why did you have to charge at him like a maniac?"</p><p>She squeezed his hand. "There were kids there, Jane. I couldn't let them get hurt. I knew if I distracted him enough, Rigsby and Cho could get to him. It was a calculated risk. He was using a 9mm, so the bullets weren't going to get through the vest, and he always shoots for center of mass, we knew that. With the parka covering the armor, it minimized the chances he'd change his target. I'm not gonna tell you there wasn't danger, but I knew what I was doing, and I had every expectation I'd make it through."</p><p>He bowed his head.</p><p>"Hey," she said, "I'm fine. It's just a big bruise. Come on, when I got shot for real you had me making phone calls for you. This is nothing."</p><p>He glanced up at her, and the stricken look on his face told her that bringing up past injuries had been a mistake.</p><p>A nurse bustled in then, sparing her from having to climb out of that conversational pit trap, and by the time he left, Jane had built himself a wall of serenity to hide behind. He kept quiet as they waited for the doctor, but he kept hold of her hand as well.</p><hr/><p>Lisbon glanced at herself in her bedroom mirror. She'd invited a still-subdued Jane in after he drove her home from the hospital, and left him in her living room while she changed. Her hair was up in a sloppy ponytail, and the scoop neck of her over-sized t-shirt showed the top of the contusion spreading across her chest in angry reds and deep purples.</p><p>A piece of her wanted to let things slide for the evening, to just curl up on the couch with a movie and a pizza and not worry about anything more momentous than what Jane might be inferring from the titles on her bookcase. But that would be a mistake. He was now at his most vulnerable, and she would capitalize on any advantage available to her in getting what she wanted from him.</p><p>She had watched Red John fail to subvert Jane, and Jane fail to con Red John or crack Lorelei, and she had learned from their mistakes. Red John had not offered Jane anything he wanted more than his revenge, just as Jane hadn't offered Lorelei anything more precious to her than her loyalty to Red John. And he hadn't given that monster anything real at all. What she intended to offer Jane was both genuine and, she believed, valuable to him.</p><p>Bargaining was not something that came naturally to her, but it did to Jane, and that was what mattered. It was a solid plan, she assured herself. She'd examined the evidence, she'd determined her goal, and she'd considered the potential outcomes. But none of that stopped her palms from sweating or her heart from beating double time as she opened her door and approached him.</p><p>He was sitting on the couch, staring at nothing, but he looked up when she entered the room.</p><p>"Why are you so nervous?" he asked.</p><p>She shrugged and sat down at the other end of the couch, toying with the hem of of her shirt. "I want to talk to you," she said. She realized she'd thought about everything but how to begin. She glanced up at him and saw - Patrick Jane. Her friend. Someone who cared for her, someone she would do almost anything for. And that was what made it so hard. Because she could see both the good in him and the danger of him, and if she could not bridge the gap between them, she doubted anything else would.</p><p>"About what?" he asked gently.</p><p>"I don't want us to fight anymore," she said. "I know you're not trying to trick me or use me. I believe that I'm important to you, and that most of the time, even if I can't trust you to be exactly honest, I can trust that we're on the same side and that we'll get where we need to go together, one way or another."</p><p>"But?" he prompted.</p><p>She looked up at him. "But most of the time isn't enough. I know right now you think you've turned over a new leaf and you're being very open with me, but right now I'm your most pressing problem, and that's not always going to be the case. I don't trust what's going to happen when Red John decides to get your attention again, or when you dig up some exciting new clue about him." She drew a breath. "So I want us to make a deal."</p><p>His expression sharpened. "What kind of deal?"</p><p>She bit her lip. "The kind that requires both of us to make real compromises. Ones that don't come naturally to either of us." She drew herself up and looked steadily into his eyes. "What I want from you is to be all the way in on Red John, all the way until the end. When you have a new thought, you tell me. When you want to investigate something, you tell me. When you make a plan, you talk to me about it before putting anything in motion. When he sends you a message, the first thing you do is bring it to me. Even if the message is a threat to my life or that he wants you to meet him alone and if you talk to anyone he'll start executing hostages, <em>the first thing you do is tell me. </em>I want to be the other half of your brain where Red John is concerned. No lies, no delays, no omissions."</p><p>He tapped his lower lip. "Just you, though, right? Not the rest of the team?"</p><p>"Just me, and if I think the team needs to know something, I'll talk to you about it first."</p><p>"And what are you prepared to offer me in return?"</p><p>She smiled. "Where Red John is concerned, I will do anything you ask to preserve my own safety. If you want me to get an alarm system, you want me to tie cans on my doorknobs, you want me to wear a tracking device, I'll do it. You want to hire me a bodyguard, I'll let you. You want me to sit it out when we finally track him down, I'll do that too - though I'll send someone in my place to protect you. Anything you think will make me safe, I will go along with - as long as it doesn't diminish my ability to do my job on all our other cases. And no pretending something is about Red John when it's not." She swallowed. "I'll keep holding up my end of the bargain until Red John is caught or until you break your word. If you don't do what we agreed, all bets are off and I can do anything I want - up to and including inciting him to come after me to lure him out into the open."</p><p>Jane leaned back and considered her. "Well, that's an interesting proposal. Deceptively simple."</p><p>"There's nothing devious about it," she said. "It's perfectly obvious what I'm up to. I want to change your incentive structure. Up until now you've felt you could make me safer by keeping things from me. I want to make it so you can keep me safest by telling me everything."</p><p>"Everything about Red John."</p><p>"Yes," she agreed. "Lies on any other topic don't count. Though lies about someone or something associated with him would. And correspondingly," she added, "you have no control over the risks I take to solve other cases."</p><p>"I suppose that's fair," he conceded, though she could see the wheels turning in his head. "You realize that not everything I do is going to be legal, and if you know in advance you'll be aiding and abetting?"</p><p>She shrugged this off. "Come on, how many times have I looked the other way when you've broken the law already? How many laws have I personally broken going along with you by now?"</p><p>"I'm not just talking about a little penny ante B&amp;E," he warned her. "I'm talking about things that could end your career if it comes to light you covered them up."</p><p>"That's a trade I'm prepared to make," she said. "So keep in mind that if you break the deal to protect my job, you'll be risking my life instead." She stood up.</p><p>"I'll let you think it over," she said, and headed to the kitchen. She put water on to boil and rummaged around in her cupboard, coming up with a box of some fruity herbal tea she'd bought a while back when she had a lingering cold. She supposed he could drink that.</p><p>She'd just poured water into their mugs - she was having cocoa - when she heard him come up behind her.</p><p>"I have some additional terms," he said.</p><p>She smiled to herself, having expected no less, and turned around. "Let's hear them."</p><p>"Keeping you safe from Red John does me no good if you get yourself killed by someone else," he began, glancing down at the livid bruising on her chest. "I want you to make your best effort to keep yourself alive in all circumstances."</p><p>She shook her head and handed him his tea. "The deal only works if both of us are very clear on what does and does not constitute breaking it. What you're asking is too vague, and also - I'm a cop, Jane. Risking my life comes with the territory. I'm not going to tell the rest of the team to take chances I won't, and I'm not going to stand by and let someone get hurt if I can stop it. I can't."</p><p>He shrugged, as if he'd expected as much but still had to try. "I want one evening a week," he said.</p><p>She gave him a wary look. "What does that mean?"</p><p>"Once a week, you and I get together after work and discuss the case and whatever else we feel like. You want me to tell you things, we need a time to make that happen."</p><p>She cocked an eyebrow. "What if Red John gets the wrong idea?"</p><p>He waved this away. "We'll meet on Wednesdays - not a traditional date night - and go our separate ways at a reasonable hour. It's not unheard of for us to see each other outside of the office. If the way we behave the rest of the time doesn't change, I don't see why it would arouse suspicion."</p><p>"All right," she agreed, "but if something important comes up, I don't want you waiting a week to tell me."</p><p>"Granted."</p><p>"Any other conditions?" she asked. She knew she didn't have the upper hand - she had plainly laid out what she wanted, and he must see that she was prepared to offer significant concessions to get it. She had, these past days as she made her plans, felt an unwilling sympathy with Jane's Vegas gambit, his calculations of how much of himself he was willing to bargain away in exchange for his heart's desire.</p><p>But after studying her over the rim of his mug for a long moment, he said, "No. I accept your terms, plus my one night a week."</p><p>She blinked. She was tempted to ask if he was sure, but that would only encourage him to reconsider his assent. She had thought through how to respond to a variety of objections and demands, but found she was thrown off-balance by success. She realized she'd anticipated negotiating with a Jane who ruthlessly took advantage of any opportunity presented to him, the man he'd described in his letter who grabbed as much as he could from everyone around him while offering as little as possible in return. But this was not that person. This was a Jane who yearned for her friendship and trust, and might have been willing to give more than she had asked to receive them. Who had no desire at all to force her into anything against her will. She felt a twinge of shame for having thought so poorly of him.</p><p>Uncertainly, she held out her hand to him. He put down his tea and accepted it, shook it while looking into her eyes with a gentle, penetrating gaze, and then used it to pull her towards him. She let herself be tugged, raising her arms to catch herself against him as he wrapped his around her, and then they were embracing, clutching at each other, and when she took a breath she drowned in the scent of him, spice and leather and dark chocolate.</p><p>Tears burned in her eyes, and he made a soothing noise and stroked her hair with one hand even as the other fisted in the back of her shirt, holding her fiercely. The pressure of his chest against hers was painful, making her bruises throb unhappily, but that ache was nothing compared to the constriction of her heart, which felt like it was going to split in two.</p><p>She hid her face against his vest and squeezed her eyes shut, but it didn't stop the tears from falling, or her breath from coming in shuddering gulps, or ease her frantic grip on him. It was not until he'd promised to be her Jane again that she'd known just how much losing him had hurt, but now it hit her all at once, and she could not regain her self-control.</p><p>So she just let him hold her, his nearness overwhelming but necessary, like a shot of adrenaline to jump-start a failing heart. She thought of the last time he'd embraced her - <em>Good luck, Teresa. Love you -</em> and how that had felt like a goodbye, even though he'd just come back to her. But this, now, felt like a reunion, like he was finally home. Or like she was, like she had been lost in the desert, parched and alone, and now she was drinking deep in a shaded oasis.</p><p>It was only when she began to calm down that she realized he was shaking too, and her shoulder was damp where he'd buried his face in it. She raised a hand to run her fingers through his hair and squeeze the back of his neck.</p><p>It took a few more minutes before he'd regained his composure enough that he stepped away from her and fished a handkerchief out of his pocket to tidy himself. Her stomach took this as a cue to gurgle ominously.</p><p>He laughed, looking surprised by his own mirth. "You have an angry Muppet chained up in there or something?"</p><p>She shrugged defensively. "Hey, getting shot at takes a lot out of me."</p><p>His smile grew alarmingly tender. "Well, then we should definitely feed you up before you faint away like a delicate little bullet-proof flower."</p><p>"Flowers can't even faint," she grumbled, rummaging through the drawer under the microwave for takeout menus. "You want Chinese or Indian?"</p><p>"Ask your Muppet to decide."</p><hr/><p>An hour later, Lisbon looked up from her diminishing supply of beef chow fun to find Jane watching her, his chopsticks poised just above his bowl of eggplant in garlic sauce.</p><p>"You were testing me this week, weren't you." It wasn't really a question.</p><p>She shrugged and looked back at her food. "I had to be sure."</p><p>"That whole business with Yang - you were trying to make me jealous. You wanted to see how I'd react. Why didn't I spot that?"</p><p>"Nothing I said to you was a lie," she said. "He does like me, and I was tempted." She took another bite. "And you did think I was flirting with him to spite you."</p><p>His face went blank with horror. "Was getting shot today about me too? Did you run at a murderer pointing a gun at you to find out if I'd care if you died?"</p><p>Her mouth twitched with guilt. "No… not primarily."</p><p>"<em>Not primarily?"</em></p><p>"I thought about it," she admitted, "but I wasn't going to. It would have put the rest of the team at more risk than if we waited for backup. But then there were those kids by the fence. I needed to get the perp's attention away from them."</p><p>"So you were <em>tempted</em> to get yourself shot to see how I'd react, but then decided not to <em>because it would have put other people in too much danger.</em>" He put his food down as if it had offended him. "Except then <em>luckily</em> you found an excuse to do it anyway. Good god, woman, do you have no regard whatsoever for your own life?"</p><p>"It wasn't an <em>excuse, </em>Jane, it was the right thing to do! And I did not intend to die. But I had to know." Not to know if he cared about her life - she'd been clear on that already - but to know if he cared <em>enough,</em> if this was the lever she could pull to shift his course from the channel Red John had dug out for him to one just slightly askew from it. She'd seen that her romantic availability would not do the trick, and she'd believed she would have only one chance to make him an offer he wouldn't refuse. She had to be sure she got it right. It wasn't about how little she valued her life, but about just how desperate she was to fix the two of them. But she didn't think saying that would make him feel better.</p><p>"And do you know now?" he asked bleakly. "Are you sufficiently convinced that your death would destroy me, or can I look forward to a repeat performance next time you start developing doubts?"</p><p>"I'm convinced," she muttered. Then her guilt burned out as she remembered why she'd been in that position to begin with. "And don't act so innocent, here. I would have made the same call if you'd been in a different state. The only dishonest thing I did today was keep my eyes closed for two extra seconds so I could see your face when I opened them. Two seconds, Jane. You made me worry about you for six months!"</p><p>"I wasn't pretending to be dead!"</p><p>"No, you were pretending you thought you might as well be. Where do you think I believed you were headed, all that time? You think I didn't check the hospitals, after you disappeared? You think I didn't check the morgues?"</p><p>He slumped down, defeated. "I'm sorry."</p><p>She reached over and squeezed his hand. "Hey," she said. "We're not going to do that to each other anymore, right?"</p><p>He shook his head.</p><p>"We have the deal now," she continued. "We'll be working together from here on out. No more secrets, no more tests."</p><p>He visibly marshaled himself and put on a bright smile. "Well, maybe a few non-Red-John-related secrets, just to keep you on your toes," he said. "I wouldn't want you to get bored."</p><p>"Your secrets tend to result in a lot of extremely dull paperwork for me," she told him, "so when it balances out I'm not sure I come out ahead on the boredom scale. Maybe you should stick to entertaining us with magic tricks instead."</p><p>He picked up his food again. "Now what fun would that be?" he said lightly. "Variety is the spice of life."</p><p>"And you're practically a one-man variety show."</p><p>"Why Lisbon, are you saying<em> I'm</em> the spice in your life?" He grinned. "If things are too dull for you, I'd be happy to kick it up a notch."</p><p>She laughed. It felt right, joking with him. It felt like having the ground back under her feet. "I think I'm good for now," she said.</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0010"><h2>10. Chapter 10</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  <strong>Day 10:</strong>
</p><p>In the middle of the afternoon, Jane rapped his knuckles against Lisbon's office door and proceeded to enter without waiting for a response. He'd spent the majority of the day up until then lying on his couch with his eyes firmly shut while the rest of the team filled out paperwork for their killer cop case.</p><p>"Your place or mine tonight?" he asked.</p><p>"What?"</p><p>"It's Wednesday," he reminded her.</p><p>She blinked at him. "You said one night a week. We've talked outside of work every day for - I don't even know how long. You actually have something new to tell me?"</p><p>"That was before the deal started," he told her. "You promised me Wednesdays. Do you really want to set a bad example for me right off the bat?"</p><p>"Fine," she said. "You can follow me home after work."</p><p>"Actually I'm heading out early. But I'll see you tonight."</p><p>He disappeared before she could reply.</p><p>x-x-x</p><p>When she arrived back at her apartment building that evening, she noticed Jane on her next door neighbor's balcony, drinking a glass of iced tea and apparently deep in conversation.</p><p>She waved at him, and he jumped up and immediately began making his excuses.</p><p>"You and Tabitha really seemed to hit it off," she commented when he met her outside her door.</p><p>"Did you know she's quite a talented sculptor, but her parents wouldn't let her study art so she's a biology major instead? She says learning about different species' anatomy has been a genuine inspiration to her. But actually my favorite of your neighbors is Mrs. Nguyen on the third floor. She makes a lovely cup of tea."</p><p>Lisbon glanced up at him in the midst of unclipping her holster from her belt. "Did you ditch work to come and make friends with everyone in my building?"</p><p>He shrugged unrepentantly. "You didn't need me there anyway, you were just filling out forms. That's not my thing."</p><p>She supposed this must be part of his plan to keep her safe. "And are any of my neighbors working for Red John?"</p><p>"No," he said, making himself at home on her couch. "No need to fear for your life in the laundry room. Now, I'm going to need keys to your apartment and your car."</p><p>"What for?"</p><p>"Don't look at me like that, I'm not going to be sneaking in while you're in the shower. But now that I'm in charge of your security, I'll need to take certain steps that require access to your space. I promise not to take any liberties unrelated to your safety."</p><p>"So what are you going to do?"</p><p>"Better you don't know," he told her. "If you don't know what measures are in place, you won't act any differently because of them, and no one watching you will be tipped off."</p><p>She wanted to argue with him. She wanted to tell him that if he was doing things in or to her home she had a right to know about them. But she'd made the deal knowing she was agreeing to things that might make her uncomfortable, and if one of them broke it, it wasn't going to be her. Besides, she told herself, if he really wanted to get into her apartment, not having a key wasn't going to stop him.</p><p>So she held her peace and retrieved her guest key for him. "It'll take me some time to have an extra car key made," she said.</p><p>"That's fine. You can give it to me next week." He tucked her key carefully into a vest pocket. "Incidentally, I'll be out of town this weekend attending to some business. Please don't send the authorities after me."</p><p>"Will you be doing anything I should know about?"</p><p>"Not at all." He smiled at her. "Now how would you feel about some dinner?"</p><p>The rest of the evening passed uneventfully. There was no further discussion of deals, serial killers, personal safety, or any lingering issues between the two of them. Jane didn't pour on the charm the way he had when they'd gone out for ice cream, he just kept her company for a simple meal and an old movie about a marriage of convenience between a WWII-era scientist and a wealthy young widow determined to assist his work.</p><p>She glanced at him several times during the film, surprised that he seemed to actually be engrossed in it.</p><p>"What?" he asked during a commercial break.</p><p>"You're usually much more complaintive about movies," she observed, thinking of one particular leading man who happened to be a Visualize member whom he would refer to only as <em>that cultist with the lizard eyes. </em></p><p>"What's not to like? Any man who isn't a little in love with Katharine Hepburn doesn't have a soul," he informed her. "Besides, romances are much more convincing when the stars are actually in love. Here the poor woman's driven to distraction because she thinks Spencer Tracy doesn't care for her when he plainly thinks she hung the moon. But they'll get there in the end."</p><p>She clicked the mute button as the movie resumed, happy to drop the conversation.</p><p>Jane excused himself soon after it ended. It all felt extremely normal, which she knew full well was his precise intention, right up until she walked him to the door and he gave her a hug instead of letting himself out. He held her gently for a few seconds, until she awkwardly raised her arms to clasp him back. Apparently satisfied with this reciprocation, he pressed a quick kiss to the side of her head and murmured, "I love you."</p><p>She stepped back immediately, frowning at him in confusion.</p><p>"Yes, I do have to keep saying it," he said as if answering the question she hadn't asked. "If I don't, you'll tell yourself I've changed my mind. Which, I'm sorry to tell you, is never going to happen."</p><p>And with that, he was gone.</p><p>Lisbon found herself ill at ease that night. She'd successfully distracted herself for the rest of the evening, but as soon as she turned out the lights and tried to sleep, unwanted thoughts crowded her mind. In less than two weeks, she'd gone from threatening to arrest Jane if he entered her apartment to giving him his own key, and the ups and downs of it all made her feel dizzy. Also, she had imagined that a closer working relationship might reassure him enough that he'd reconsider his personal designs on her. Early signs did not suggest that this would be the case.</p><p>And if he kept giving her hugs and saying - that - then… She didn't know what then, that was the problem. She knew he cared about her. Their whole deal was predicated on the intensity of his desire to protect her. So if he wanted to call that love, well, she couldn't exactly refute it. There were a lot of kinds of love, she reminded herself. Most of them, of course, wouldn't involve telling someone you wanted to give yourself to her, body and soul.</p><p>Just remembering those words in his voice kindled heat in her, and she rolled over in bed, trying to escape it. <em>You are my heart</em><em>'s desire,</em> he had written to her. But he still clearly had no intention of acting on it, beyond continuing to affirm his affections. She found herself frustrated that he had so completely failed to ask anything of her at all in this regard, anything she could grant or withhold, anything she could control.</p><p>It left her in limbo, with nothing to hold onto but a handful of wishes, tempting but insubstantial. He had bemoaned how Red John had condemned him to a half-life, but in a way Jane was doing the same thing to her, tethering her to something while holding it out of her reach. All without actually <em>doing</em> anything. It was maddening, but she understood his reasons too well to even be properly angry at him about it.</p><p>Well, she eventually concluded, there was really only one solution. They would just have to catch Red John, sooner rather than later. Then Jane would be out of excuses, and she would find out if there was ever going to be more to him than words.</p><hr/><p>
  <strong>Day 13:</strong>
</p><p>Lisbon sat at her desk on Saturday afternoon, an itchy feeling between her shoulder blades. The CBI was mostly empty, the Financial Crimes Unit abuzz for some reason, but the rest of the building staffed mainly by a few bored agents waiting for the phones to ring. She herself was painstakingly pulling up the records for every single case her team had worked since she'd taken command of it, one by one, and Jane's paranoia had thoroughly infected her.</p><p>The man himself was off to parts unknown, despite having gotten himself poisoned by belladonna tea not two days before. It had been fun, she had to admit, pretending to hallucinate with him to trick their murderer into believing she was in mortal peril. But he'd been cagey about what exactly the teenage Charlotte his brain cooked up had said to him. And he'd insisted on taking his weekend trip despite her many concerns about his mental and physical health, driving off practically as soon as the killer was in handcuffs.</p><p>So she'd decided to spend her time pursuing the theory that Red John might have requested their involvement in a case. But she had to do it in a way that didn't make the target on her back any bigger. She understood exactly what she'd done to Jane - she'd made him feel personally responsible for her safety, even more than he had before. She'd exploited his guilt over Angela and Charlotte's deaths. She hadn't done it lightly - she wanted him to have a positive purpose, one significant enough to have some chance of competing with his need for revenge sufficiently to stop him from doing something irretrievably stupid. And if it came off right, he would have a second chance, an opportunity to save someone he - cared about - from a terrible fate. But it also meant that if Red John actually did kill her, it would be the end of him. He would never be able to live with himself. So she had to keep herself alive.</p><p>She didn't think Red John had any imminent designs on her life - except for asking Jane for her corpse, which she knew was more about him than her, he'd never directly threatened her. But she also knew what had happened to Bosco and his team when they'd gotten too close. If she was on the right track, anything she found out might trigger an attack. So she had to hide what she was really doing.</p><p>She'd decided to review cases even from before Jane had joined the team, both to conceal her real purpose and to see if she could notice any difference in the cases they got before and after his arrival. She was working with the ostensible purpose of reviewing her team members' performance and skills, with the hope of getting at least some of them reclassified as specialists rather than general agents during the upcoming budgetary planning sessions, as that would come with a pay raise. On her computer, she was making notes on the cases where her agents had demonstrated particular expertise. On a pad of paper, she was recording how they'd gotten pulled onto each case, as well as any unusual encounters with local LEOs she could recall.</p><p>But despite her precautions, the feeling of being watched persisted. She wondered if her office was bugged - if Jane could do it to Bosco, it certainly seemed plausible that Red John could do it to her. But listening to her tapping away at her keyboard all day would be extremely tedious. Red John got around, he recruited followers, it didn't seem likely he was camped out in his basement feverishly watching surveillance feeds on someone who hadn't managed to catch him in years of trying. He was, she thought, efficient. More likely he had alerts set up in their system to notify him if they were getting anywhere near him, rather than monitoring all of their activity. She should talk to Van Pelt about that, she thought. Maybe if they could find which files were flagged, it would tell them where to look. Or, of course, it might result in a bullpen riddled with bullets.</p><p>It was like trying to sneak up on a spider who could feel the vibrations every time a single strand in his invisible web was touched. But maybe, if they were careful enough, one of those threads could lead them straight to him.</p><hr/><p>
  <strong>Day 17: </strong>
</p><p>By the time Wednesday evening rolled around, Lisbon found herself looking forward to spending some time with Jane. He'd sauntered into the office on Monday with bloodshot eyes, scruffy cheeks, and a vague odor of cigarettes lingering about him, but otherwise none the worse for wear. He'd been in good spirits, helping with their case du jour cheerfully enough between his naps. But he'd left the office promptly that day and the next, without lingering for conversation. She'd begun growing accustomed to knowing what was on his mind, and being back in the dark about whatever he was up to was an unpleasant change.</p><p>But when she tried to ask him about it over pizza in her living room, he brushed her off. "Nothing you need to worry about," was all he'd tell her.</p><p>"Well, where did you go this weekend?" she asked, and took another bite.</p><p>"A few places." He brightened. "Oh, I brought you something." He pulled out a book seemingly from nowhere and handed it over to her.</p><p>She accepted it, looking at the cover curiously. <em>The Complete Works of William Blake</em>.</p><p>"I thought it might jog your memory," he explained.</p><p>"Sure. Oh that reminds me -" she went and got him her car key.</p><p>"Splendid!" he beamed at her as if she'd just baked him his favorite cake. "And I ought to warn you, I'll need to borrow a few of your things now and then. Don't worry if something's missing for a few days, it'll all turn up again."</p><p>She opened her mouth and then shut it. She'd given him carte blanche. She had no grounds to object or question him.</p><p>So instead, she pulled out the list she'd compiled over the weekend and handed it over, because no matter how frustratingly closed-mouthed he was being, stonewalling him back was not going to advance their partnership.</p><p>He took it eagerly, paging through it, then looking up at her with shining eyes. "This is excellent work," he told her. Then his face turned thoughtful. "Honestly I never paid much attention to how cases came to us. It just seemed like pointless bureaucracy. You'd tell me an address, I'd show up and look at a body, and that was the start of it for me. You gave me the work - I seldom thought about about who gave it to you. Stupid, really."</p><p>She shrugged. "You're not really one of us. You only care how the system works to determine the minimum amount you have to accommodate it and how you can get around the rest." At his slightly wounded look, she added, "I'm not trying to criticize you. I'm just saying - we all have our own points of view. That's why we work with partners - so someone else can compensate for our blind spots and we can fill in the blanks for theirs. You notice lots of things I don't. Is it really that surprising I might see a few that you miss?"</p><p>"Of course not," he said. "I value your insight. It's just…"</p><p>"You've always been a one-man show," she said. "You think you should be able to figure everything out, all by yourself. But like you said - that hasn't always gotten the best results."</p><p>He took a breath. "I'll go over your list and let you know which ones are viable suspects."</p><p>She smiled. "Sounds good."</p><p>He helped himself to another slice of pizza and turned on her TV. <em>His Girl Friday</em> was just starting. Over the next two hours, as newspaper editor Cary Grant's schemes to stop his ex-wife and star reporter from marrying another man escalated from pickpocketing and manipulation to kidnapping and passing counterfeit currency, Lisbon had dire premonitions about what might be in store for poor Kevin Yang if she ever actually dated him. More disturbing was the question of whether she'd be as heartbroken as Rosalind Russell if she thought Jane had given up and let her go. Because that was what made the movie a romantic comedy and not a horror show - that she was just as complicit and invested in their games as he was. She never really wanted to quit her job and marry Ralph Bellamy in the first place. Yet her rekindled relationship with Cary Grant seemed no healthier at the end of the story than it had been at the start. Neither of them had really changed at all.</p><p>There had to be a compromise, she thought, between being wholly subsumed by the thrill ride of your job and being a housewife in Albany. But she found she couldn't quite imagine what it might look like.</p><hr/><p>
  <strong>Day 24:</strong>
</p><p>When Lisbon arrived home, she found Jane already there, sitting on a couch that did not belong to her.</p><p>"What happened to my couch?" she demanded, though she had been down this road before and was not in much doubt about where it led.</p><p>"This is your couch now."</p><p>Her eyebrows flew upward. "Was the old couch a threat to my safety?"</p><p>"It sacrificed itself for a greater purpose," he explained unhelpfully. "This one is better anyway. And your new neighbors helped me move it in - that Israeli couple on the ground floor. They're quite friendly, I gave them your old couch in exchange for their trouble."</p><p>She just shook her head. "I think I've seen them around," she said, bemused. "They look very… outdoorsy."</p><p>"Those are the ones! Gur and Rivkah. They said if I'm ever around on a Friday they'll give me some challah."</p><p>"How very nice for you."</p><p>"Come on, sit down, give it a try." He patted the seat next to him encouragingly.</p><p>She sighed and accepted the inevitable. The new couch was a pleasant blue color, providing a splash of brightness in the room without seeming garish, and the seat wasn't too deep to be comfortable for her. It had high enough arms to lean back against properly when she stretched out and - yes - just the right combination of firmness and give in the cushions. Jane, she hated to admit, did know his way around a couch, and he'd obviously picked this one out with her preferences in mind. Not, of course, that she'd ever discussed her furniture preferences with him, but what did that matter.</p><p>Deciding to set the issue of the couch aside, she reached down to remove her boots, her thoughts returning to what they'd learned that day. "So Lorelei had a sister who was sold and then murdered. Quite a family."</p><p>"You don't turn out like Lorelei growing up with the Cleavers," he observed. "It's interesting, isn't it, what happened to Miranda."</p><p>"How so?"</p><p>"It's not at all a typical Red John murder - no cutting at all, the rape, the lingering death."</p><p>"Maybe he had an accomplice, like with Maya and Emma Plaskett."</p><p>"True. But what I was thinking was how much it explains about his relationship with Lorelei."</p><p>She looked up at this. "How so?"</p><p>Jane looked faintly uncomfortable. "I kept trying to understand how they worked as a couple," he explained. "Red John is a sadist. I believe he's unable to achieve sexual pleasure without causing intense pain. But Lorelei isn't a masochist. She might like it a bit rough, but nothing on the scale of what he'd want to do to a woman. But it makes sense if every time they have sex, he's reliving the rape and murder of her sister, and the amount of pain that loss caused Lorelei. She is a living souvenir of that crime."</p><p>Well, that was depraved and repulsive. But it added up. The thought of Jane trying to figure out Red John's sex life was also off-putting, but of course that was part of the job. "Ew," she said.</p><p>He shrugged. "It's Red John. I thought the 'ew' was implicit."</p><p>"We need to get our hands on the evidence from Miranda's murder," she said. "Maybe the accomplice was sloppy. Maybe the change in MO caused Red John to make a mistake."</p><p>"Probably not," he said gloomily. "And even if there is something, he'll probably grab it out from under us before we even get there."</p><p>On some level, she didn't think Jane fully believed in physical evidence as anything but a formality to buttress court cases - to him, solving crimes was only about people, and getting them to give up what they knew. Which made sense - that was his area of expertise. But it didn't mean his way was the only way. "I'll keep it strictly on paper, no digital communication or requests. Cho and Rigsby will go personally and pick up the evidence. We'll see what we get."</p><p>He plastered a smile onto his face. "Sure. Now, what would you say to some dinner?"</p><hr/><p>
  <strong>Day 38: </strong>
</p><p>He buried his face in her hair and breathed in, and when he pulled back and exhaled, she smelled the tea he'd been drinking. She did not believe sneaking beverage supplies into her kitchen cupboards was strictly necessary for her security, but she was sure if she asked him, he'd come up with some rationale about how he couldn't possibly be expected to scheme properly without it.</p><p>"Good night, Teresa. I love you." His grip on her tightened for a moment before he released her, and she let her arms slide from his back, surprised at her reluctance to let him go. His lips ghosted across her forehead, his face crinkled in an affectionate smile, and then the door was open and he was through it.</p><p>She turned the lock automatically and found herself staring at the empty space he'd just occupied, trying to parse the subtleties of every gesture. Had he held her a second longer than the week before? Did a forehead kiss mean something different than one on the side of her head? Had his voice been just a bit huskier? These questions plagued her every time, though there were never any answers. She hated that he was doing this to her, turning her into the sort of woman who tried to read the tea leaves of a man's every gesture. Yet she suspected, infuriatingly, that she would like it even less if he actually stopped and went back to treating her the same way he did whenever it wasn't Wednesday night.</p><p>Or Friday morning. He'd insisted on adding Friday breakfasts to their schedule once she'd accepted Mancini's invitation to join the Thursday night poker group. Initially he'd wanted to bar her from going at all, which had resulted in their worst fight since the deal began. She'd told him their agreement didn't give him veto power over her whole social life, and he said no, only when it involved a room full of Red John suspects. She'd pointed out that only half of them were actually on the list they'd been developing. Then he'd opened his journal and added the other half of the poker players on the spot. She'd told him if being part of the game made someone a suspect, he should write her name down too. He told her it was a stupid argument because the terms of the deal clearly gave him the right to prevent her from socializing with even one suspect. She said getting to know them better would help narrow down the list. He had then vividly described how easy it would be for one of them to slip something into her glass, tell the others she'd had too much to drink when she started getting woozy, offer to take her home, and then have her alone and unconscious in a car headed to a nice cozy abattoir where no one would ever hear her screaming. She'd said fine, she wouldn't drink anything any of them gave her. He'd said actually, she shouldn't ever drink anything anyone gave her unless she trusted them completely, and bought her a collection of thermoses and glass flasks that she was to use for all her hydration needs. He also insisted on debriefing her about the poker games every Friday morning before work. So now once a week she woke up to Jane fixing breakfast in her kitchen, because God forbid he should start a day without eggs.</p><p>He didn't touch her, those mornings, or talk about his feelings, but the look on his face when she shuffled in wearing her pajamas and he handed her a perfect mug of coffee said enough. That expression, tender and yearning and hopeful, could almost convince her that he truly did want a life with her, that this was how he wanted every day to start. That she was not just a symbol or a substitute to him. She didn't let herself think about it, though. Believing in that future would only make it worse if it all still went off the rails, despite everything they'd both done. She would believe it when he was willing to make it real.</p><p>Overall though, having him as her personal security guard was less invasive than she'd thought it might be. Whatever he was doing, it remained mostly invisible to her. As he'd promised, a few of her belongings had wandered off. First, her favorite purse had gone missing. When she'd complained that it felt heavier when she got it back, he'd said, "Yes, but now it can stop bullets." He hadn't explicitly told her to stop using her other bags, but he did smile so happily whenever he saw her with the reinforced one that she had started carrying it more frequently, despite understanding he was basically using his approval to train her like a dog. Her leather jacket had also taken a leave of absence, though its weight hadn't perceptibly changed upon its return. Then her watch went walkabout. Her mother's cross vanished from around her neck on a Friday and reappeared on her nightstand Sunday morning without visible alteration. Occasionally she would come home and get the vague sense things had moved around a little since she'd left, but she could never pin down the changes. All things considered, it could have been a lot worse.</p><p>She sighed and went back to the living room, picking up their empty glasses and carrying them to the kitchen. Agonizing over Jane was, she reflected ruefully, actually less frustrating than the rest of their evening had been. Every avenue of their investigation seemed to be at a stand-still. They were having key pieces of evidence from Miranda Roman's murder re-examined by a private lab under a false name, but the early results had been useless.</p><p>While Van Pelt hadn't been able to find Red John's infiltration of their computer network herself, she'd recruited a friend of hers to help, a Swedish hacker she'd met at an encryption workshop. He'd nosed around in the CBI systems and ultimately found, as Lisbon had suspected, flagged entries in their database that would send out automated messages if anyone accessed them. But he'd had no luck in tracking down where the messages ultimately ended up. And he didn't know which people the flags went with - only the string of numbers the database had assigned to label them. Entering the numbers to find out who they belonged to would trigger the flags. Oh, and there weren't just one or two of them - there were 159 identified so far. Jane had speculated some of them might belong to accomplices or as-yet-unidentified victims, and that some might even be decoys chosen at random to hide his tracks if his electronic incursion was detected.</p><p>And their list of suspects wasn't getting any shorter. Jane had started with the dozen or so off her list he'd thought might be viable - she was pleased that most of his picks were ones she'd thought might stand out too - and then added more candidates from the CBI, FBI, and so on. They were handing the journal back and forth on a near-daily basis, jotting down thoughts and questions for each other, but it felt like they just kept adding more possibilities instead of narrowing them down.</p><p>That evening, she'd felt especially defeated. "What if we're on the wrong track entirely?" she'd asked him. "We don't have any proof he's even in law enforcement. Like you said, he could be a plastic surgeon or a finance guy or something. All we're going on here is my hunch."</p><p>"I trust your instincts," he'd told her. "And your first guess is usually the best one. Nothing's certain yet, but it's a good theory. It's not as if we've got any other leads to be chasing down instead. Let's just keep going and see where we get with this."</p><p>But she wasn't sure they were getting anywhere.</p><p>An hour later, she was lying in bed, paging through the volume of Blake when her eyes caught on a verse in something called Cradle Song. <em>When thy little heart doth wake, Then the dreadful night shall break, </em>she read, only she didn't hear it in her own voice but another, smug and supercilious, one she associated mainly with complaining about Jane or gloating over a good hand of cards.</p><p>She grabbed her phone and dialed.</p><p>"What is it?" Jane asked.</p><p>"I remember," she told him.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>For anyone who isn't sure, what Lisbon recalls at the end there is in fact from canon - a moment near the end of S3E16 (The Red Queen), after Hightower escapes from the CBI upon being framed for murder.</p><p>Also, during this stretch of time, I like to imagine Lisbon and Jane watching a whole series of classic movies about couples immersed in denial, deception, or both, with increasing amusement on his part and discomfort on hers. Because TCM is out to get them. Here's their watchlist - since going out to the movies isn't happening so much these days, I promise you will not regret viewing any of these at home:</p><p>Without Love (1945): directed by Harold Bucquet, starring Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn. During World War II, a cynical scientist enters a loveless marriage with a strong-willed widow to advance his work on high-altitude masks for fighter pilots, but feelings enter the picture despite their best intentions.</p><p>His Girl Friday (1940): directed by Howard Hawks, starring Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell. A newspaper editor uses every trick in the book to keep his ace reporter ex-wife from remarrying.</p><p>True Confession (1937): directed by Wesley Ruggles, starring Carole Lombard and Fred MacMurray. A compulsive liar's big mouth gets her in trouble with both the law and her straight-laced lawyer husband when she's accused of murder.</p><p>The Awful Truth (1937): directed by Leo McCarey, starring Irene Dunne and Cary Grant. A husband's suspicions lead to divorce proceedings, but jealous scheming on both sides prevents either of them from moving on.</p><p>And, of course, this story's namesake - Suspicion (1941): directed by Alfred Hitchcock, starring Joan Fontaine and Cary Grant. A shy, sheltered heiress marries a charming scoundrel, but comes to fear he may be plotting to kill her.</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0011"><h2>11. Chapter 11</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  <strong>Day 43:</strong>
</p><p>It was late Monday morning when Lisbon and Jane arrived for the meeting they'd requested with Director Bertram.</p><p>He eyed them with distaste from across his desk. "What is it now?" he asked sourly.</p><p>"Good news, actually, Sir," Lisbon told him. "We've got a break in the Red John case."</p><p>His eyes narrowed. "I've heard that before, usually in conjunction with some ridiculous demand or blackmail attempt. Whatever you want this time, the answer is no."</p><p>"We don't want a thing," Jane assured him smoothly. "We just thought that you, our glorious leader, would like to be aware that we expect to have California's most notorious serial killer in handcuffs in a matter of days."</p><p>Bertram looked, if possible, even more suspicious. "All right then, let's have it. What's this big break of yours?"</p><p>"While investigating Lorelei Martins, Red John's accomplice," she explained, "we found out that her sister, Miranda Roman, was murdered years ago. We suspected that Red John was involved in that crime, and in re-examining the evidence from it, we've found traces of DNA we believe belong to him, as well as some other pertinent clues."</p><p>"So who does this DNA belong to? And why haven't I heard anything about all this up until now?"</p><p>Lisbon smiled appeasingly. "Since our investigation has been compromised in the past, we wanted our inquiries to remain as discreet as possible to avoid any interference or leaks. We assure you that you'll be the first to know when we make the arrest."</p><p>His face turned an interesting shade of red. "<em>When you make the arrest?</em>"</p><p>Jane smiled. "What Lisbon is trying to suggest is that you should have a nice press release ready to go, but don't sweat the details too much. What we don't tell you can't get back to the wrong ears."</p><p>"Are you saying you don't trust me? You work for me! I'm the head of this organization!"</p><p>"It's not that we don't trust you -" she began.</p><p>"It's that we don't trust anyone," Jane finished for her. "I didn't even want to have this meeting, but Lisbon in her boundless loyalty to you and out of deep respect for your position insisted we give you a little hint. Don't worry, once it's all over you can tell the press you were in on the investigation every step of the way and we'll go along with it."</p><p>Bertram ground his teeth together. "Once it's all over I look forward to never seeing your face again in my life. Get out of here, and don't expect me to bail you out if the FBI detains you again, I will disavow you faster than the CIA would a failed coup in Iran."</p><p>Jane stood up and bowed elaborately. "A pleasure as always."</p><p>Lisbon bared her teeth. "Thank you for your time, Sir."</p><p>Instead of returning to the bullpen, they headed up to the attic, where Jane's retreat had been converted into a command center.</p><p>"He's already making a call," Van Pelt reported, gesturing them closer so they could hear the sound from her computer's speakers.</p><p>"<em>We may have a problem,"</em> Bertram said.</p><p>"<em>Tell me what happened,"</em> a high, nasal voice replied.</p><p>"Do you have the number he dialed?" Jane demanded.</p><p>"Yes, running it now," Van Pelt told him, her keys clacking busily. "Looks like a burner phone. The number's got a 707 area code."</p><p>"That doesn't narrow it down too much," Lisbon noted. "Can you find out what tower it's using?"</p><p>"I'm working on it," she said, as Bertram repeated the salient points of the meeting.</p><p>"<em>I'll handle it,"</em> the voice replied. <em>"Find out why the lab didn't inform us, and report back on what they do next." </em></p><p>The call ended. "Did you get the location?" Jane asked, vibrating with impatience. "And we need to know every other phone number that's ever had contact with that burner."</p><p>"I <em>know,</em>" Grace said sharply, as Bertram dialed again.</p><p>"<em>This is Partridge."</em></p><p>"Got it!" Van Pelt announced. "That phone is in Oakville."</p><p>Lisbon exchanged a look with Jane. "That's just north of Napa."</p><p>Jane turned to Rigsby and Cho. "Our suspect is Sheriff Thomas McAllister. Let's go get him."</p><hr/><p>Lisbon picked up her burner phone as soon as it began to ring.</p><p>"He's in the wind," Jane told her. "Vanished in the middle of his shift, didn't radio in, no sign of him at his house."</p><p>"What do you think he's doing? Will he go to the lab and steal our phony evidence?"</p><p>Jane took a breath. "No. He'd use a minion for that. I think he wants to end the game on his terms. He'll contact me, or he'll try to get to you as a means of getting to me."</p><p>"You think it's really him? That McAllister isn't just another follower like Timothy Carter?"</p><p>"We have to assume so until we know otherwise. And if he's not Red John, he almost certainly knows who is."</p><p>"So what's our move?"</p><p>"No point being coy anymore," he said. "Let's find out who all those flagged files in the database belong to. Does Grace have to be at the CBI to do that?"</p><p>Lisbon pressed the speaker phone button, though Van Pelt was already huddled next to her to listen in.</p><p>"No, I can log in from anywhere via VPN," Van Pelt said. "And Jane - we found a lead for you. There's no other property associated with McAllister, but there's a piece of land out by Lake Barryessa that belongs to a Roy Gordred -"</p><p>"And I remembered there was a Gordred in a Blake poem," Lisbon explained.</p><p>"I should give you books more often," Jane said. "Text me the address. The two of you, go back to Lisbon's apartment and check the database from there. And be careful - he could already be in Sacramento. Stay together, and don't let anyone near you."</p><p>"Keep in touch. And you be careful too."</p><hr/><p>The next call came an hour and a half later. Lisbon was trying not to climb the walls while Van Pelt downloaded database entries one by one.</p><p>She hated not knowing what was going on, and she hated being cooped up, but Jane had kept his part of the deal so she was going to keep hers. She'd checked her doors and windows and guns and ammo clips and made Van Pelt a cup of tea, and she'd tried reading the computer screen over her shoulder, but had been shooed away, so there was nothing left to do but stare at the phone and wait for it to ring.</p><p>She leapt on it as soon as it did. "What did you find?"</p><p>This time it was Rigsby on the other end of the line. "Well, this place has some very creative defenses set up. Between the three of us, we're making progress, but it's slow going. Jane wanted me to check in with you. Any news there?"</p><p>"Van Pelt's almost done with the list. Everything's quiet here."</p><p>"Jane says to tell you to keep the curtains drawn, the doors locked and not let anyone in, not even a pizza guy. He says there are three boxes of supplies in the guest bedroom closet and one of them is in case you're hungry and one of them is in case you're bored and the other is in case you have unexpected guests. He says you'll know which is which."</p><p>A loud noise came through the phone. "Is everyone okay?" she demanded anxiously.</p><p>"Um," Rigsby said distractedly, "yeah, think so, gotta go."</p><p>The call ended.</p><p>Lisbon gritted her teeth in frustration and went on a discovery mission to her closet for lack of anything constructive to do. The box for unexpected guests contained brass knuckles, cleverly disguised knives and cans of pepper spray, gas masks, night vision goggles, stun grenades, expandable batons, a fire extinguisher, a taser, and a surprisingly high quality baseball bat. Lisbon stowed a few of the smaller items on her person, gave some to Van Pelt, and distributed the rest throughout the apartment.</p><p>The box in case of hunger included her favorite potato chips, a jar of duck rillettes, approximately a pound of Jamón Ibérico, some kind of chutney, crostini, three kinds of olives, a whole salami, shortbread cookies, dried fruits, Belgian champagne truffles, fancy popcorn, smoked salmon, chocolate covered espresso beans, Macadamia nuts, rosemary crackers, pimento cheese spread, a box of French macarons, tiny pickles, and a bag of donuts.</p><p>Jane, she thought to herself with bemused affection, was the most ridiculous person she had ever met.</p><p>She lugged the box back to the living room in case Van Pelt wanted any snacks.</p><p>"Boss," she said, looking up from her computer. "I'm done with the list. You want to take a look?"</p><hr/><p>The next call came from Cho.</p><p>"We're inside," he said. "It's definitely Red John's place. There's… evidence."</p><p>"But nobody home?"</p><p>"No sign of him."</p><p>"How's Jane doing?"</p><p>A pause. "He's keeping it together."</p><p>"Don't let him go anywhere alone," she instructed. "Don't even let him answer his phone by himself."</p><p>"You got it. But Boss - what do we do now? We call in the scene and get techs to process it?"</p><p>She glanced down at the piles of database printouts she and Van Pelt had assembled. The smallest one was presumed victims - the dead or missing. The next was ordinary citizens. By far the largest was those in law and around enforcement - police officers, CBI and FBI agents, 911 dispatchers, EMTs, prosecutors, a coroner, even a few judges.</p><p>"No," she said. "Process everything you can yourselves, take photos with your phones, collect as much as possible, make a log of it all. We'll get the evidence somewhere secure and figure out who we can find to help clean up this mess."</p><p>"Will do. Just a sec."</p><p>A few moments later, he was back. "Jane says to stay put no matter what. We'll head straight to your place when we get back into town. We should be there by morning."</p><p>And that was all.</p><p>It felt like the day had already been going on forever, but it was only seven p.m. Van Pelt was busy making and distributing electronic copies of everything they had so far - the downloaded database entries, the recording of Bertram's phone calls, the evidence her Swedish friend had found proving the CBI's systems were hacked.</p><p>Lisbon made a pot of coffee and sat down with a pad of paper, trying to figure out who she knew in law enforcement who was far enough from California to be well clear of this mess and well enough connected to put her in touch with someone serious at the FBI or DOJ.</p><p>Time passed.</p><p>She told herself it was good that she hadn't gotten any further updates from the team. Surely someone would have called her if Jane had run off, or if the whole Napa County Sheriff's Department had come after them, or - well, she supposed they wouldn't be able to call if they'd set off a booby trap and blown themselves sky-high, but that surely would have made the news. She had the TV on, and was shifting channels irritably, but with the sound off so they'd hear someone trying to break into the apartment.</p><p>Time passed.</p><p>She wondered what Red John - what McAllister was up to, if he was stalking her team from the bushes or fleeing the country or hiding on her balcony waiting for the right moment to slip inside. She decided to shove some furniture in front of the exterior doors just in case, even though by that time she'd have been relieved if he actually showed up so she could shoot him and get it over with.</p><p>Time passed.</p><p>She and Van Pelt got a deck of cards out of Jane's box in case of boredom and played kids' games, crazy eights and gin rummy and snap, having passed on the Ouija board that she assumed was Jane's idea of a joke. The phone didn't ring.</p><p>Time passed.</p><p>She made another pot of coffee. Van Pelt said she wasn't tired and then immediately conked out on the couch. Lisbon reflected on how glad she was that Rigsby'd gotten Sarah to take herself and Ben to visit her parents in New Jersey. She played a hand of solitaire, and then another. A glance at the clock told her it would soon be dawn. She ate the last of the macadamia nuts. She wondered when exactly Jane had gone shopping to stock her apartment with gourmet snacks in case of siege by serial killer, and how he felt about knowing who had killed his family at last, and what he was going to do when this was all over. She thought about their deal, and whether the concessions he had made were worth this, sitting at home doing nothing while the case of her career hit its climax without her, her team in the thick of it while she waited for her phone to ring. But Jane was with Cho and Rigsby, that had to count for something. He hadn't taken her tidbit about Bertram's taste in poetry and cooked up a scheme without her and disappeared. So far as she knew, he'd kept his word just as much as she'd kept hers. And if at the end of this, Jane was sane and alive and free, she would have no regrets.</p><p>She heard the noise, then. <em>Bang bang bang.</em> A pause. Then one more shot. She woke Van Pelt. "I heard gunfire."</p><p>Grace was instantly alert. "Do we go check it out?"</p><p>She was a cop. One of her neighbors could be bleeding out. Others might be in danger. But Jane had been very explicit, and she had made a promise, and she hadn't heard anyone scream. It could be a trap intended to lure her out into the dark. Red John could have been shooting at nothing at all. She remembered something Jane had said to her: that she was used to thinking of herself as the cop who went out and caught bad guys, but with Red John she had to think of herself as the intended victim, because he would use everything he knew about her to lure her into a position where he could take her on his own terms. The only way she could remain in control was to make him come to her on her terms instead. He'd told her she couldn't play by action hero rules when she was actually in a horror movie: <em>Don't be the brave one who goes out alone to investigate the suspicious noise and never comes back. Be the smart one who keeps her back against the wall.</em></p><p>But she <em>was</em> a cop. It was her sworn duty to protect others when they were in danger. But it was her job to protect Jane, too. She reminded herself of what it would do to him if he came back and found her dead or missing.</p><p>She could send Van Pelt out alone, but that would be handing McAllister a potential hostage. If he came to her door with a gun held to Van Pelt's head, she would open it. Of course, she'd open the door no matter who the hostage was, but it was likely to end better if Grace was backing her up from inside.</p><p>She would call for backup, but she had to assume both 911 and the CBI lines were being monitored, and there was a whole stack of people who might show up who would not make the situation any better.</p><p>"No," she decided, hating herself a little bit. "We stay here. I'm going to get someone to come check it out."</p><p>Then she dialed a number she had honestly not believed she would ever use. "Yang?" she said when he picked up. "This is Teresa Lisbon. I need your help."</p><p>But it was not Kevin Yang who knocked on her door a few minutes later. Gun in hand, she hugged the wall as she approached the door, so anyone firing through it would be likely to miss her. Van Pelt was covering her from the doorway to the kitchen.</p><p>"Hello?" she called.</p><p>"This is Rivkah from downstairs," her neighbor's voice replied.</p><p>Maybe word had gotten around that she was a cop, and they'd heard the shots and come to ask for her help, Lisbon thought.</p><p>"There is a dead man in the garage," Rivkah continued. "I think he was here to hurt you."</p><p>"What?" she said, then got a hold of herself. "What does he look like? And what makes you think he was here for me?"</p><p>"He was putting something under your car. Then he tried to climb into your trunk. Then he saw my husband and came at him with a knife, and I shot him. Here is what he looks like."</p><p>Lisbon risked looking through the peep hole to see the phone Rivkah was holding up. It displayed a picture of Sheriff McAllister. He definitely looked dead.</p><p>"Just a minute," she said.</p><p>It could still be a trick. Rivkah could be an accomplice, come to bring her out when hearing the shots hadn't done the job. Her mind raced for a moment, then settled on the obvious solution. She got her burner phone and called Jane's, keeping a wary eye on the door in case Rivkah decided to force her way in.</p><p>"Hello?"</p><p>"Jane, my neighbor's at my door and she says she shot and killed McAllister."</p><p>"Which neighbor?" he asked.</p><p>"Rivkah."</p><p>"Okay," he said. "Ask her what her husband does on Fridays and tell me what she says."</p><p>Rivkah seemed oddly unsurprised by the question. "She says he bakes bread and then he breaks it," Lisbon reported back.</p><p>"Oh thank god," he said. "You should trust her. You and Grace can go check out the scene, but be careful - there could still be accomplices lurking about. We're already on our way, we'll be there soon."</p><p>"Jane, why do you and my neighbor have a secret code?"</p><p>"Be safe," he said, and hung up.</p><hr/><p>There was in fact a dead sheriff on the ground and a device attached to the undercarriage of Lisbon's car. She couldn't be sure, but she thought probably it was intended to blow out a tire and force her to pull over.</p><p>She and Van Pelt cordoned off the garage for safety, then questioned the neighbors on the far side of a concrete divider from the vehicle.</p><p>"Why were you down here this early?" she asked.</p><p>"Morning bike ride," Gur said, gesturing toward the bicycle storage room across the garage. There was a bleeding cut on his forearm - presumably a defensive wound.</p><p>They were wearing quite a bit of Lycra. And shoulder holsters. "Do you usually carry weapons while exercising?"</p><p>"Always," Rivkah said. "Your country is full of crazies."</p><p>Lisbon did not currently feel in a strong position to argue the point.</p><p>"How did you know the car was mine?" she asked.</p><p>Rivkah looked at her like she was stupid. "Because we see you driving it. We live here."</p><p>Their entire story was, on the surface, completely reasonable. And yet she didn't buy any of it.</p><p>But before she could ask more questions, Yang arrived with his partner, a woman named Alvarez, and she left the neighbors to Van Pelt while she got them up to speed.</p><p>She'd just sent them off to search for McAllister's vehicle and anyone else he might have brought with him when a CBI SUV screeched up and the rest of her team piled out of it. Jane rushed to her and looked her over, running his hands up and down her arms as if to verify she was in one piece.</p><p>She looked at Cho while Jane continued his inspection. "McAllister's dead. Shot four times. But apparently he attached an explosive to my car, so we can't process the scene until we can defuse it. You know anyone we can trust who's good with bombs?"</p><p>"Yes. I'll make the call."</p><p>"Check with Van Pelt first to make sure your guy's file wasn't flagged."</p><p>Cho turned away, and she shifted her attention to Jane, who was staring at her with a combination of shock, relief, and what appeared to be gratitude.</p><p>"You're all right," he said, possibly more to himself than to her.</p><p>"Of course I'm all right, I've done nothing but sit at home all day and all night. How are <em>you</em>?"</p><p>He shook his head. "I wasn't the one in danger. When he couldn't get my attention directly, I knew he'd come for you."</p><p>"What do you mean, when he couldn't get your attention? What did he do?"</p><p>Jane shrugged. "He called me a few times."</p><p>Lisbon couldn't believe this was the first she was hearing about this. "What did he say?"</p><p>"I don't know. I gave my phone to Cho as soon as we left. I wasn't sure I'd be able to stick to the plan if I heard whatever he wanted to tell me. But I figured once he saw I wasn't going to pick up or go off on my own anywhere, he'd come here instead. When he texted me a photo of your building, we started back immediately."</p><p>"Why didn't you warn me he was here?"</p><p>Another shrug. "It was under control. I didn't want you to worry more or try to go out and find him."</p><p><em>Under control</em>, she thought with disgust. "So the new neighbors are what - my bodyguards?"</p><p>He looked uncomfortable. "Is that really something you want me to tell you on the record right now?"</p><p>If she, as an officer of the law, knew that Jane had paid the people who killed Red John, the case was suddenly going to be a lot more complicated than a well-armed couple who stumbled across a crime in progress and took action to defend their lives.</p><p>For a moment she wanted to make him say it anyway. The truth was what mattered. If he'd done something, it was for the system to decide if it was wrong or right.</p><p>But then she thought about everything else he had and hadn't done in the previous days and weeks. She thought of him handing Cho his phone to prevent himself from being goaded into doing something stupid. Her eyes burned with sudden tears. He really had changed.</p><p>She was about to tell him to drop it when Yang approached them.</p><p>Jane grabbed her shoulder, alarmed. "What's he doing here?"</p><p>"It's okay," she told him. "I called him in. When I heard the shooting, I asked him to come check it out since I couldn't go do it myself."</p><p>He stared at her, eyes big and soft. "You heard gunfire but you stayed inside anyway?"</p><p>She looked down, still somewhat ashamed of her choice. "I promised you," she mumbled.</p><p>He grabbed her in a bear hug then, and despite it being an active crime scene with Yang and the team and a growing crowd of neighbors watching, she hugged him back. He pressed a kiss to her temple, and then another one and another.</p><p>She pulled back a little, looking at him in confusion, addled by some combination of exhaustion, the crash of her adrenaline high, the gallon of coffee she'd consumed in the past twelve hours, and his arms around her.</p><p>"But it's not Wednesday," she said.</p><p>He grinned at her, so wide it threatened to split his face in two. "Lisbon," he said. "It's over. Every day is Wednesday now."</p><p>Yang coughed to reclaim their attention. Lisbon stepped away from Jane as the two men regarded each other, Yang with good-humored resignation and Jane with the cold gleam that meant he was assessing a potential enemy and compiling a detailed list of his vulnerabilities.</p><p>"We didn't find anyone else suspicious near the property," Yang reported. "We did find McAllister's car, but since explosives might be involved, we held off on trying to search it."</p><p>"Thanks, Yang," she said, trying to focus on her next move. They needed to get an ME they could trust to take care of the body. They needed to arrest Bertram before he could flee the country or start destroying evidence. They needed to find some other law enforcement body to manage what was surely about to be the total implosion of the CBI in the wake of his arrest. How early, she wondered, was too early to wake up California's Attorney General with some very bad yet very pressing news?</p><p>She glanced up and noticed that the sky was beginning to lighten. It was going to be an awfully long day, and it hadn't even started yet. But she had every expectation that they were all going to live through it, and that was as much as she could ask.</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0012"><h2>12. Chapter 12</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  <strong>Day 59:</strong>
</p><p>Lisbon glanced over at Jane, who was sprawled out on the couch in her office, napping or pretending to. It was such a familiar sight it made her chest ache - it could have been almost any day from before he left, if she just didn't look too closely. For a second, she missed how things had used to be, when even if they hadn't been good, they had at least been stable. She had understood the world she operated in and the people it contained, she knew what to expect. The CBI had felt like home.</p><p>Now, instead of the familiar faces of her fellow agents on the other side of her windows, there were strangers walking the halls, a swarm of FBI personnel flown in from far-flung corners of the country to dismantle the institution she had dedicated her life to. In a single day, the CBI had been shut down, every employee suspended pending criminal investigation. The next day, the Feds had arrived, under the leadership of a Supervisory Agent from Minneapolis, and begun combing through their files for evidence of corruption. Gale Bertram had been arrested at the San Francisco airport, holding a plane ticket for Bangkok. The day after that, Lisbon and her team were cleared to resume their investigations under the temporary auspices of the FBI, and the work began in earnest.</p><p>It had not stopped. Bertram had sung like a bird in exchange for having the charges associated with Red John's murders dropped - Lisbon wasn't crazy about that, but the many conspiracy, corruption, and obstruction of justice charges would, in aggregate, result in him going away for a long, long time. With his testimony, the network he called the Blake Association began to unravel rapidly, the arrests piling up even as many in the group decided to evade justice by any means necessary. Some of them turned on each other, killing those co-conspirators who held the most damaging information on them. A few days later, another Blake member had directed them to the maximum security prison where Lorelei had been squirreled away. Lorelei's devastation at being presented with the news of McAllister's death quickly turned to fury when they showed her the evidence found at the Roy Gordred property that conclusively tied him to her sister's murder. She'd agreed to spill everything she knew about McAllister's other followers in exchange for Jane's promise that he would identify and bring to justice whoever else had participated in Miranda's killing.</p><p>Many of McAllister's psychopathic friends had gone to ground when his death was splashed all over the news, along with the revelation that he'd been Red John. One of them set off on his own private murder spree, determined to follow in his master's footsteps. The next week was spent chasing them down.</p><p>It was only now, two weeks and two days after McAllister died in her parking garage, that Lisbon could begin to catch her breath. Everything too urgent to be postponed until tomorrow had been squared away and it was only 7 p.m. She could take the evening off and - what? That was the problem.</p><p>No, she could admit to herself, the problem was the man lying in angelic repose across the room. He'd told her that every day was going to be Wednesday, but this had not turned out to be true. Or at least not entirely true. Things <em>had</em> changed. <em>He</em> had changed. He seemed unburdened, even hopeful. It was only now that it had arrived that she could see how little he'd ever really expected there to be an <em>after </em>for him.</p><p>She'd thought that once the Red John case was closed, he might lose his interest in their work entirely, but in fact he seemed to enjoy it more, sparkling with self-satisfied delight at every confession he tricked from a suspect. The frustration and impatience that had dogged him through the long years of failure had fallen away, leaving him present and engaged in a way she hadn't quite known was missing all that time.</p><p>And his fondness for her was palpable. He practically radiated pleasure each time they met, and his hand attached itself to the small of her back whenever they walked together. He hugged her with a frequency she would have vetoed on grounds of unprofessionalism if the context had not been the cataclysmic upheaval of both their lives. Van Pelt had shot her more than one inquiring glance about it all, but she could only respond to these with a baffled shrug.</p><p>Because other things had not changed at all. He had not crossed any of the lines he'd claimed to be so eager to traverse. There had been no passionate declarations, no romantic surprises, not a single measly kiss. Not that there'd been much time for any of those things, but Jane excelled at creating opportunities for himself. When he wanted to.</p><p>So the logical explanation was that he <em>didn't</em> want to. That she'd been appealing so long as she'd also been unavailable, a dream never meant to be fulfilled, a port longed-for in the midst of a hurricane but unnecessary once the sky cleared. Everyone needed hopes to get them through dark times. She could understand that. She wouldn't hold it against him if his affection for her turned out to be more platonic than he had thought.</p><p>She could learn to live with it, if she only <em>knew.</em> But she didn't know. Because it had also occurred to her that he might just be unsure of himself. He'd been alone for a very long time. The last woman he'd been with had thrown herself at him at the behest of a serial killer. So it was possible that he did want her, but didn't quite know what to do about it. He had talked a good game about how he planned to romance her, but she knew him well enough to understand that it had been a fantasy about who he wished he could be as much as what he wished he could do with her.</p><p>So she had tried to give him space to figure it out. Probably she should just continue doing so, and sooner or later he would make his intentions known. The last thing she wanted to do was push him into something he was uncomfortable with, or would regret later. But it was Wednesday, and she missed him. Because now not even Wednesdays were Wednesdays anymore. The last couple, they'd been neck-deep in work, so it wasn't like she'd expected him to come over for a movie night. They certainly didn't need to carve out a special time anymore to talk about the Red John case - they did that all day, every day now. But he hadn't even taken her aside for a moment to say… what he usually did.</p><p>And now he seemed like he'd be content to just sleep the evening away on her couch. But she didn't want that.</p><p>She considered balling up a piece of paper and throwing it at him, but decided that would be too childish. Finally achieving clarity about what she wanted had come with the unfortunate side effect of making many of her pettier impulses toward him seem humiliatingly reminiscent of schoolyard flirting.</p><p>"Hey Jane," she said instead.</p><p>His lips curled upward, though his eyes remained closed. "Yes, my dear?"</p><p>"You want to go get some dinner?" Inviting him to her apartment as if it was the old kind of Wednesday seemed like too much, but they still had to eat.</p><p>His smile widened. "Are you asking me out on a date?"</p><p>She hated how her face heated at that. Maybe suggesting dinner out hadn't been the safe option after all. And surely what he'd said counted as flirting, right? Why would a man ask that if he didn't want the answer to be yes? But, she reminded herself, Jane teased her all the time without meaning anything by it. And he enjoyed making people uncomfortable. "Do you think I'm asking you out on a date?" she replied.</p><p>He opened his eyes and rolled into a sitting position. "No," he said after studying her for a moment, "I think you're just hungry."</p><p>She thought maybe he sounded disappointed, but she couldn't be sure. She gave him a smile. "And I want a little company," she said.</p><p>"Well, far be it from me to deny you anything you desire," he said, rising to his feet and stretching, as she tried not to read anything into that statement.</p><p>She cleared her throat. "You in the mood for anything particular?"</p>
<hr/><p>They ended up at a Lebanese restaurant, where their conversation remained light until after they'd placed their orders.</p><p>But eventually she couldn't keep from blurting out one of the questions that had been weighing on her. "Were Gur and Rivkah lying about what happened in the garage?" The case was officially closed now, with no charges pressed. Asking was as safe as it would ever be.</p><p>He shrugged. "If they were, they didn't tell me about it."</p><p>She glared at him. "Like you couldn't see it from looking at them."</p><p>"They're very good at what they do," he said mildly. When she refused to relent, he sighed. "McAllister really was doing what they said he was to your car. But maybe they could have stopped him without killing him if they'd wanted to."</p><p>"If they'd wanted to, or if you'd wanted them to?" she pressed. "Did you hire them to guard me or to kill him?"</p><p>"Do you really think those were different things?" he asked, eyes cold. "Their job was to protect you no matter what. I showed them Red John crime scene photos so they knew what failure would look like. I warned them that if he went for you once and got away, he'd just come back again with a better plan and more firepower. I told them the truth."</p><p>She could tell by the look on his face that was all she'd be getting from him. "It's interesting, isn't it?" she said instead. "You said you'd never use me as bait in a trap for him, but that's exactly what I was in the end."</p><p>"What I meant was I'd never put you at any additional risk. I kept you where you'd be safest - that just happened to be in the middle of a trap." He smiled. "And you said you weren't the princess in the tower, waiting for someone else to slay the dragon."</p><p>She lifted a shoulder. "The bait's only effective if it stays in the trap."</p><p>"Speaking of your tower," he said lightly, "you can have these back now." He held out her keys.</p><p>Well. She'd wanted an answer and now she'd gotten one, she thought as she took them from his hand, feeling like he'd stabbed them straight into her heart. As tactful messages went, he could hardly find a clearer way to say he wanted more distance from her, not more intimacy. She wished he'd at least had the decency to wait until they'd gotten the check to do this. There was no avoiding him reading the pain of this rejection from her face, but then she at least could have left instead of having to sit through a meal with him silently pitying her from across the table.</p><p>She turned away to tuck the keys into her purse, trying to get her expression back under control.</p><p>"Gur and Rivkah had those," he told her suddenly. "They don't need them anymore. But, uh, I made a copy of your apartment key. I thought maybe if you don't mind I'd keep it - in case of emergency."</p><p>She shot a quick, guarded look at him. "What kind of emergency?"</p><p>"Oh, any kind. You know - like an ice cream emergency."</p><p>"What exactly constitutes an ice cream emergency?" she asked.</p><p>"Well, for example if I knew you needed ice cream and I picked some up for you, but I got to your apartment before you came home and had to get it into your freezer so it wouldn't melt."</p><p>"I see."</p><p>He fidgeted with his cutlery. "So would that be all right with you? If I held onto your key?"</p><p>She smiled. "Far be it from me to deny you anything you desire."</p><p>Their food arrived then, breaking the tension between them, and they lapsed into the privacy of their own thoughts for a few minutes as they ate.</p><p>"Have you thought about what's next for you yet?" Jane asked eventually. "You going to take the FBI up on their offer?"</p><p>Supervisory Agent Vanessa Taylor had tried to recruit her, promising to carry over credit for her years of experience at the CBI. She'd start out on someone else's team to get a feel for how the FBI operated, but with a clear path to promotion.</p><p>"I'm thinking about it," she conceded. "But it would be a big change. Five months of training at Quantico, and then they might assign me anywhere in the country."</p><p>"Change can be good though," he said.</p><p>Well, the two of them living thousands of miles apart would certainly be a change, she thought, trying to keep the bitterness off her face. Her gaze dropped to her plate. "What about you?" she asked. "Any plans?"</p><p>"I thought a vacation might be in order," he said. "Taking some time off sounds pretty good right now."</p><p>That made sense. She didn't know why she'd imagined he'd choose to keep working with her. He'd had more than his fill of death and crime, he deserved to go enjoy himself. Unraveling and repairing the damage the Blake Association had done to the California justice system would take months or more likely years, but he had no obligation to participate in it. He'd done his part.</p><p>"You have a destination in mind?" she asked, aiming for casual and probably missing.</p><p>"I thought we might go somewhere tropical," he said. "Lounge around on the beach, do some diving. Or we could rent an RV and hit the road, visit some national parks, see some old friends. I've always wanted an Airstream."</p><p>"'We?'" she asked, heart in her throat, needing to be sure.</p><p>"Of course <em>we,</em>" he told her, looking distraught. "Was that not - I told you I wasn't going to leave you again. Unless <em>you</em> don't want -" understanding crossed his face, then regret. "I stopped saying it and you stopped believing it," he muttered. Then he looked up at her. "I just didn't want to pressure you, with everything else going on. I wasn't sure - I thought you might want some time."</p><p>"<em>I </em>was giving <em>you</em> time," she said. "I think you should say it, just so we're clear."</p><p>He glanced around the restaurant, then pulled out his wallet and tossed some bills onto the table, between their half-eaten meals. "Come on," he said, standing up and taking her hand. "I don't want an audience for this show."</p><p>He towed her out of the restaurant and around the corner of the building, away from the entrance. They paused at the edge of the mostly-empty parking lot, in the orange glow of a streetlight.</p><p>He took her other hand and they stood there, smiling at each other in expectant silence. His eyes were wide and bright with something that could have been eagerness or fear. It struck her that Patrick Jane might actually be feeling shy, and that made everything suddenly real. The amusement faded from her face. He was about to change both of their lives.</p><p>Or maybe now that the moment had arrived, he wouldn't. Maybe he wasn't ready. She'd said before that she wouldn't put her life on hold to wait for him, but she wasn't going to turn away from him now. Not if he'd only just tell her what was in his heart.</p><p>"Teresa," he began, saying her name the way no one else did, like it was an endearment, or a magical incantation. "I have a new life because of you, and the only thing I want to do with it is be with you. Will you let me do that? Will you let me take you to Fiji and follow you to Quantico and the Omaha Field Office and go back to Chicago with you for the holidays? Will you let me lie beside you at night and flirt shamelessly with you during the day and kiss you every chance I get? Will you let me bring you food when you forget to eat and rub your back when you've been hunched over a computer for hours and steal your car keys when you're too tired to drive but won't admit it?"</p><p>She had no poker face at all. Her smile was so wide it almost hurt and she pulled her hands from his to place them on his shoulders instead, stepping closer to him, the heat of his body through his layers of clothing pulling her in like a magnet. His hands came to sit at her waist, not holding her, just resting against her, but she couldn't have broken away from him for a million dollars.</p><p>"I might be able to put up with all that," she said, "but what will I get in exchange for it? Will you let me hold you when you're hurting and yell at you when you get us in trouble and protect you when you make someone want to punch you in the nose? Will you try to believe me when I tell you that you deserve to be happy again? Will you trust that even when I'm so mad at you I want to scream, I still love you more than anything on earth?"</p><p>An emotion so strong it resembled agony passed over his face at that, and he seized her, crushing her against him. She wrapped herself around him, wanting there to be no space between them at all, wanting them to climb into each other's skin and keep going so deep that when they came out the other side, there would be no him without her or her without him anymore. She tilted her head and kissed his neck, feeling his skin against her lips for the first time, and both of them gasped.</p><p>"You've got yourself a deal," he said, voice rough as gravel.</p><p>She couldn't say how long they stood there, holding each other, trying to breathe. As time went on, their embrace shifted. His hands moved up and down her back; her fingers tangled in the curls at the top of his neck. They began to sway gently to an unheard melody.</p><p>Then, as if a switch had flipped, they straightened and fit themselves back together and without hesitation or preliminaries they were kissing, mouths open, tasting each other, pulling one another impossibly closer, feeding off each other's obvious desire.</p><p>Lisbon's mind went pleasantly blank. There was just too much raw sensory data coming in to think about anything else. There were the things he was doing with his lips and his tongue and - oh God, his teeth too? - and his hands - when had they slipped under her shirt to trace lines of pleasure across the small of her back, how was she ever going to cope with it when he touched her there to guide her along at work after this? - and the little sounds he was making, like he was as undone as she was - and the smell of him, za'atar from their abandoned meal and cologne underlined with just a hint of sweat - the luxury of his hair between her fingers - the hard lines of his body against hers - the warm puffs against her face when he exhaled and she inhaled, breathing in the same air that had been inside him a moment ago -</p><p>A car honked from the street and she jerked away, panting, suddenly aware that she'd been about ten seconds away from trying to undress him in public. Jane, oblivious, sought after her, trying to pull her back in. She let him hold her, but angled her head so their foreheads would brush together instead of their lips. Her eyes drifted shut as she enjoyed this different form of closeness.</p><p>After a moment, his grip on her lost some of its urgency, though none of its firmness. He chuckled. "Oh, now you're really in trouble," he said.</p><p>It took her a second to identify the unfamiliar tone in his voice. He sounded… happy. "Why's that?"</p><p>"Now that I know how good that is, I'm never going to give you a moment's peace, you'll be fending me off from morning til night."</p><p>"Oh?" she asked, amused. "But after sundown I'll be safe from your advances?"</p><p>"No, that's when I expect you to stop fending and let me have my wicked way with you."</p><p>She laughed, despite the heat that bloomed in her at his words. "But Jane," she said, "I trust you to understand how important my job is to me and not do anything to undermine me while we're at work."</p><p>He took a quick breath and she opened her eyes to find him looking at her with staggering intensity. "Will you say it again?" he asked. "Please?"</p><p>She blinked. "I trust you?" she tried, uncertainly.</p><p>"No - the other thing. From… before."</p><p>She cast her mind back. It was difficult to remember anything past the kiss. Then she understood what he must mean, and though her cheeks flushed, she didn't look away from him while she said, "I love you. So much."</p><p>He pulled her closer, into another hug, and mumbled something into her neck. She wanted to know what he'd said, but lacked the heart to detach him from her sufficiently to render him audible. She figured she knew the general idea.</p><p>Around the corner of the building, the restaurant door slammed open and a group of people came into view, talking loudly as they made their way to their various cars. It occurred to Lisbon that they should probably do the same.</p><p>The reasonable option would be to say goodnight and go their separate ways. They both had a lot to process already. She had no idea how fast or slow Jane wanted to go with her. It would probably be better for them to take their time testing out these new waters. They'd made their positions clear, they'd kissed - that ought to be enough for one day.</p><p>But she couldn't stand the thought of being away from him, of not getting to hold him again for twenty-four hours.</p><p>"You want to come back to my place?" she asked.</p><p>He nodded into her neck, then lifted his head enough to nip her earlobe and whisper, "Let the wickedness commence."</p>
<hr/><p>At first, she was glad they'd taken separate cars - she wasn't sure she'd have been able to drive safely with Jane smoldering at her from the passenger seat, maybe even touching her…</p><p>But as the minutes passed and her pulse slowed, doubts began to creep in, and she wished he was there, so she could see what he was feeling. Rational thought had returned, and she could see that at the restaurant she'd once again jumped to the wrong conclusion about him, and he'd once again gone overboard trying to persuade and reassure her, and she'd just poured more gasoline onto the emotional conflagration until its flames consumed them both. But what if he was ignoring his own hesitance or reservations in his desperation to keep her at his side? What was going to happen when they calmed down and the pendulum swung back the other way?</p><p>By the time she parked her car, she was half-convinced he was going to bail on her, that if she was lucky she'd get a text saying some urgent business had come up and she'd see him tomorrow.</p><p>But she found him waiting for her at her front door, staring at her doormat as if it held the secrets of the universe, hands shoved into his pockets, so much tension in his posture he might as well have been pacing back and forth.</p><p>She wondered why he hadn't let himself in. She wondered if he was trying to be a gentleman or if he'd decided to tell her in person he'd had second thoughts and wanted to call it a night. He looked up at her approach. Their eyes caught, and she didn't know how to decode the tangle of desire and doubt on his face.</p><p>She opened her mouth to ask him something, but the enormity of the situation - what they had said to each other, what they were possibly about to do - struck her again, and she lost all her words.</p><p>Instead, she unlocked her door and left it open for him as she went in, flipped on the lights, put down her bag, took off her jacket. She heard the door close and looked up to watch him brush past her and stop a few feet away, his eyes so dark and hungry she could feel their weight on her skin.</p><p>The air crackled with the charge between them and her whole body throbbed in response.</p><p>But instead of making any move toward her, he looked away, seemingly uncertain, and once again the imperative to devour him gave way to her need to take care of him.</p><p>She swallowed and stepped closer. "We don't have to do anything tonight," she said, awkward but certain she had to say it. She could stand him leaving now, but she couldn't stand him looking at her with regret in the morning. "We don't have to rush. You can just sleep on the couch if you want or -"</p><p>He brushed a finger across her lips, silencing her, and then cupped her face with his hands and looked into her eyes. "What are you afraid of?" he asked softly.</p><p>"I'm afraid I'll ask for too much," she admitted, "and you'll try to give it to me and then flip out and leave me."</p><p>"That's not going to happen," he promised, giving her a soft kiss. "There's no such thing as too much. I might - I might be bad for you, I'm arrogant and stubborn and reckless and I lie and play tricks and hide myself, but I'm not going to leave you, or reject you."</p><p>"Okay," she said, closing her eyes and trying to believe it. Then she took a breath and looked at him again. "What are you afraid of?"</p><p>He shrugged. "I'm afraid of - of what you make me feel. Of having to really live again. Of disappointing you."</p><p>She studied him. "What else?"</p><p>His face twisted. "I'm afraid I ruin everything I love," he choked out. "That the closer I get to you, the faster I'll destroy you."</p><p>Her heart broke a little, and she pulled him against her, his head on her shoulder, her arms around him. "Angela and Charlotte's deaths weren't your fault," she said as plainly as she could. "You didn't kill them. McAllister did, and he's dead now. He can't take anything else away from you."</p><p>"I made mistakes, though," he said roughly, holding her tight. "Terrible mistakes."</p><p>"And you learned from them, and you changed," she told him. "You're not that man anymore. And people are allowed to make mistakes. <em>You're</em> allowed to make mistakes. It won't be the end of the world if something goes wrong. We'll just - we'll just pick ourselves back up and keep trying." She kissed the top of his golden head, wondering how this sweet, beautiful man could believe his love was a danger to her. Then, her stomach sinking, she remembered that not so long ago she'd thought exactly the same thing. She'd been more afraid of the suggestion that he loved her than the possibility that he might hate her. She'd been convinced he would bring her nothing but pain. And maybe she'd had her reasons, but she resolved that she would never again make him feel less than welcome in her life or her heart. "Being close to you isn't going to destroy me. That's just silly. In fact it's the opposite. You kept me safe, didn't you?"</p><p>He nodded against her shoulder, and she found herself remembering it - not the bodyguards or the bulletproof purse or the fear, but the boxes of games and odd delicacies in her closet. Because even if they'd partially been a terror-driven effort to rob her of any excuse to open her door against his instructions, they had mostly just been his way of giving her whatever distractions and small pleasures he could in what he knew would be a difficult time for her. He hadn't just wanted to protect her from being murdered, he had wanted to protect her from getting hungry. She squeezed him tighter.</p><p>And she understood that beneath every fear he had named was another, one that stalked him like a lion. "I'm not going to leave you either. You're not going to lose me. We made a deal, remember?"</p><p>He took a deep breath, and when he let it out again, he was holding her differently. With intent. "I do remember," he said, shifting his head so she felt the words against her neck, followed by his lips, gentle but insistent, working their way up toward her ear. She tilted her head to give him more room, and he rewarded her by finding an especially tender spot and suckling at it until her knees went weak. She pushed him off and lunged for his mouth, their momentum carrying them on until his back hit the wall mid-kiss. She pressed herself against him, appreciating the additional leverage. He moaned encouragingly and she was surprised to find his hands under her shirt again, more daring this time, venturing up her sides.</p><p>She hoped they were done talking because she wasn't sure she could form words anymore. She fumbled blindly at his vest buttons and then his shirt as they kissed, and when her fingers finally found his skin, she broke away to look at him, disheveled and glorious, his lips wet and full, his chest - downed with coarse golden curls - rising sharply with each heavy breath. She lowered her mouth to taste him, scraping his skin delicately with her teeth, and she learned that while arousal cut the link between her thoughts and her vocal chords, it did the opposite to him.</p><p>"Teresa, Teresa," he began, the words tumbling out rich with pleasure and urgency, "you're lovely, you're perfect, you're my heart and my soul, let's never stop doing this... <em>Oh</em>, sweetness, <em>mmhm</em>, darling, you're so soft, my tough scary cop, you're like silk and petals, can I - can I -"</p><p>His fingers were dancing at the waist of her slacks, and she found she did have one word left after all.</p><p>"Yes."</p>
<hr/><p>
  <strong>Day 60:</strong>
</p><p>Lisbon felt eyes following her as they walked into the building previously known as CBI headquarters the next morning. She straightened uncomfortably, trying to figure out what they were looking at. It wasn't that odd for her and Jane to arrive at work together, and she was pretty sure there weren't any giant love bites on her neck or anything. Had he taped a sign to her back while she wasn't looking? A quick glance at her reflection in a pane of glass told her this was not the case.</p><p>When they got up to their floor, it wasn't just looks anymore, there was a murmur of quiet conversation that stopped as soon as she got too close. She glared at Jane suspiciously, but he gave nothing away.</p><p>Then her office came into view and she ground to a halt in the middle of the bullpen, Jane almost running into her back.</p><p>There were flowers in her office. Not just a bouquet. From what she could see, there were more flowers than office in her office. She turned to Jane, incredulous. How had he managed it? He hadn't been apart from her for more than a minute since they'd driven back from dinner last night.</p><p>"What did you do?" she snapped.</p><p>"You appear to have an admirer," he told her, enjoying himself enormously.</p><p>"What the hell were you thinking?" They had, she noticed unhappily, acquired a significant audience.</p><p>"Me?" he asked, his face the portrait of innocent surprise, except for the twinkle in his eye.</p><p>She grabbed his wrist and dragged him into her office. It smelled like a heavily perfumed jungle. Up close, the display was even more overwhelming. Except for the couch, a small area of her desk, and narrow footpaths from the door to those locations, every flat surface was covered with floral arrangements, each one elaborate and beautiful and distinct, lilies and orchids and peonies and gardenias and a dozen things she couldn't name. There was even a vase perched on top of her shredder.</p><p>She turned to Jane, trying to hang onto her outrage. No one had ever done anything like this for her before, and she couldn't deny that a significant portion of her was charmed and flattered. But why could he not have had them sent to her apartment?</p><p>"You couldn't even wait one full day before announcing it to the whole building?" she demanded.</p><p>There was that innocent look again. "I'm sorry Lisbon, was it supposed to be a secret? I had no idea." Then he grinned. "Besides, you're the one who announced it by blaming this on me in front of everyone. There isn't even a single card in here with my name on it."</p><p>She smacked him on the arm.</p><p>He shrugged, unperturbed. "I'm not ashamed of being with you. Are you ashamed of having people know we're together?"</p><p>"Well, no," she conceded grudgingly, "but this is a place of business!"</p><p>His eyes narrowed. "Are you kidding me? This is a hotbed of lust and salacious intentions! You think I don't see how the men look at you around here? I have no intention of letting one of these FBI cowboys try to steal you away from me, and I for one am happy for them all to know it."</p><p>If anyone but Jane had said that to her, he would have gotten a punch in the face for his trouble. But though she didn't doubt that he would fight tooth and nail to keep her, she also knew he had not actually done this primarily to stake a public claim on her. She knew he respected her in a way she didn't think anyone she'd dated truly had before.</p><p>Apparently sensing that she'd begun to relent, he took her hand. "You were promised a florist's shop," he reminded her.</p><p>She looked around, remembering. "As I recall, I was also promised a night on the town. And being dragged away from the table halfway through dinner does not count."</p><p>"I also said I would tell you…" he began, then paused as if to see whether she'd let him go on. She inched slightly closer to him, eyes wide. His were fathoms deep as he continued, "that you're my whole world. I know you didn't believe me two months ago when I said I was in love with you, but it was true then, and I love you even more now, just as I'll love you more still in another two months, and two years, and so on." He brushed her cheek with the back of his hand.</p><p>"I'm sorry it took me so long to believe it," she said. "I'm sorry I was so hard on you."</p><p>"Don't be sorry," he said. "I think it was good for us, in the end, to go through that. You made me own up to a lot of things I was hiding from for a very long time. And I think I did the same for you."</p><p>She nodded. "I hurt you, though," she said unhappily.</p><p>"Being with you like this - it would have been worth so much more than that. It's worth anything."</p><p>She found herself leaning into him, her eyes drifting shut, until she remembered where they were. She straightened, eyes narrowing in a different way. Less than half an hour in and he already had her on the verge of breaking her no-kissing-at-work rule. He was good, she had to give him that.</p><p>She smirked at him, letting her eyes rove up and down his form with undisguised appreciation. "Tonight," she told him, "I'm going to show you just how much that means to me. But I don't have your way with words, so I'm afraid it'll have to be a very… hands-on demonstration…" she leaned closer, and breathed into his ear, "…<em>Patrick</em>."</p><p>Then she turned and strode out of the office with a swing in her step just for him.</p>
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